REMIN I S CENCE S OF 




BY HIS SON COUNT ILYA TOLSTOY 









Class 

Book 

GoppghtN^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



i 



i 



REMINISCENCES OF 
TOLSTOY 



^ 




TOLSTOY — A CHARACTERISTIC POSE 



REMINISCENCES OF 
TOLSTOY 

BY HIS SON COUNT ILYA TOLSTOY 



TRANSLATED BY 

GEORGE CALDERON 



Illustrated with 
Numerous Photographs 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 

1914 






Copyright, 1914, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, October, igi^. 



OCT 19 1914 
kl,A380968 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I DESCRIPTION OF THE CHARACTERS OF HIS CHIL- 
DREN, FROM ONE OF MY FATHER'S LETTERS. IM- 
PRESSIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD. MY MOTHER, 
FATHER, GRANDMOTHER, HANNAH, THE THREE 
DUNYASHAS. LESSONS. THE SCHOOL .... 3 
II THE HOUSEHOLD. NIKOLAI THE COOK. ALEXEY 
STEPANYTCH. AGAFYA MIKHAILOVNA. MARYA 
AFANASYEVNA. SERGEI PETROVITCH .... 19 

III YASNAYA POLYANA. THE HOUSE. PORTRAITS OF 

ANCESTORS. MY FATHER'S STUDY 35 

IV CHRISTMAS TREES. IT 'S THE ARCHITECT'S FAULT. 



PROKHOR. ANKE PIE 



54 



V AUNT TANYA. UNCLE KOSTYA. THE DYAKOFS. 

PRINCE URUSOF 64 

VI JOURNEY TO SAMARA 78 

VII GAMES; MY FATHER'S JOKES; BOOKS; LESSONS . 96 
VIII RIDING. "THE GREEN STICK." SKATING .... 108 

IX SPORT 119 

X "ANNA KARENINA" I34 

XI THE LETTER-BOX I46 

XII SERGEI NIKOLAYEVITCH TOLSTOY 173 

XIII FET, STRAKHOF, GAY I95 

XIV TURGENYEF 212 

XV GARSHIN 235 

XVI THE FIRST "DARK PEOPLE." THE ASSASSINATION 

OF ALEXANDER IL THE SPY 242 

XVII THE END OF THE SEVENTIES. THE GREAT CHANGE. 

THE MAIN ROAD 255 

XVIII THE MOVE TO MOSCOW. SYNTAYEF. THE CENSUS. 

FYODOROF. SOLOVYOF 269 

XIX MANUAL LABOR. BOOT-MAKING. HAY-MAKING . 281 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XX MY FATHER AS A FATHER 303 

XXI MY MARRIAGE. MY FATHER'S LETTERS. vXn- 

ITCHKA. HIS DEATH • • • • 330 

XXII HELP FOR THE FAMINE-STRICKEN .... 



344 

XXIII MY FATHER'S ILLNESS IN THE CRIMEA. ATTITUDE 

TOWARDS DEATH. DESIRE FOR SUFFERING. MY 
MOTHER'S ILLNESS 360 

XXIV MASHA'S DEATH. MY FATHER'S DIARY. FAINTING 

FITS. WEAKNESS 375 

XXV MY AUNT MASHA TOLSTOY 386 

XXVI MY FATHER'S WILL. CONCLUSION . . . . . .395 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Tolstoy — A characteristic pose Frontispiece' 

Yasnaya Polyana 6* 

The Gates of Yasnaya Polyana 6 

Tolstoy and His Pupils, Peasant Children 15 

Tolstoy as a young man 22 

The midday meal 28 

Photographs of the family ^7 

Tolstoy's room on the ground floor at Yasnaya Polyana . 43 
Starting upon a horseback ride from Yasnaya Polyana . . 50 
The village library and librarian at Yasnaya Polyana . . 59 

The station at Yasnaya Polyana 59 

Summer at Yasnaya Polyana 66 

Uncle Kostya Islavin y2 

Stables at Yasnaya Polyana 81 

Peasant women of the Yasnaya Polyana district . . . .87 

A view of the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana 94 i 

Tolstoy enjoying a game of chess 103 • 

At Yasnaya Polyana, February, 1908 114 

The Pond at Yasnaya Polyana 114 

Pupils of the common schools of the region, guests of Tol- 
stoy at Yasnaya Polyana 123 

A "Hunger Group" 136 

Porthouse mentioned in "Anna Karenina" 136 

Facsimile of a Tolstoy manuscript 141 

Tolstoy and his daughter, Alexandra 150 

Mikhail, Andre, and Tatyana, Tolstoy's daughter .... 167 
Tolstoy, with the wife of his eldest brother. Count Sergei 
Nikolayevitch .... 176 

Peasant's cottage near Yasnaya Polyana 181 

A public well near Yasnaya Polyana 181 

Tolstoy and Dr. D. L. Nikitin in the Crimea 194 

Nikolai Nikolayevitch Strakliof 203 

Sergei Semyonovitch Urusof 203 

The day's mail 214 

Tolstoy and his grandson 223 

Tolstoy and his family in 1893 232 - 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A general view of Yasnaya Polyana 245 f 

At the Pokrof Hospital 2541^ 

Tolstoy among the peasant children 254 ^' 

Group of Peasant Girls at Yasnaya Polyana 263^ 

A Later Family Group 274 

Corn grown at Yasnaya Polyana 283. 

Harvesting at Yasnaya Polyana 283 V 

Packing Apples on Tolstoy's Estate 290 

Sorting the fruit 290 

Village near Yasnaya Polyana 296 

Hay-making on Tolstoy's Estate 296 

Tolstoy's Five Sons 305 

Tolstoy and His Grandchildren 311'- 

Tolstoy, his son Lyof, and the son of Lyof 318^ 

Tolstoy and Alexandra 327 y 

Countess Tolstoy 334. 

The last walk of Tolstoy, with his wife, from Yasnaya Poly- 
ana to Krekshino 340 

Tolstoy visiting the women's section of the Psychiatric Hos- 
pital at Pokrof 349 

Among the patients ^ and doctors at the Troitsa District, 

Psychiatric Hospital 349 

Tolstoy and Dr. Makovicky, his physician and friend . . 355 • 

In the Crimea during his illness 362 

Countess Tolstoy, denied admission to the house in Astapovo, 
where: Tolstoy was lying in his last illness . . . . . 371 

Princess Obolensky and aunt Masha 382 

On the estate "Meshtcherskoe" in June, 1910 382 

Tolstoy, and his only sister, Maria Nikolayevna, for more 
than twenty years, until her death, a nun in the Shamar- 

dino Convent 391 

Tolstoy's rooms as he left them on October 28th, 1910 . . 405 



REMINISCENCES OF 
TOLSTOY 



REMINISCENCES OF 
TOLSTOY 

CHAPTER I 

DESCRIPTION OF THE CHARACTERS OF HIS CHILDREN, 
FROM ONE OF MY FATHER'S LETTERS. IMPRES- 
SIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD. MY MOTHER, 
FATHER, GRANDMOTHER, HANNAH, THE THREE 
DUNYASHAS. LESSONS. THE SCHOOL. 

IN one of his letters to his father's cousin, Alex- 
andra Andreyevna Tolstoy, my father gives 
the following description of his children: 

The eldest (Sergei) is fair-haired and good-looking; there 
is something weak and patient in his expression and very 
gentle. His laugh is not infectious, but when he cries, I 
can hardly refrain from crying too. Every one says he is 
like my eldest brother.^ 

I am afraid to believe it. It is too good to be true. My 
brother's chief characteristic was neither egotism nor self- 
renunciation but a strict mean between the two: he never 
sacrificed himself for any one else, but always avoided, not 
only injuring others, but also interfering with them. He 
kept his happiness and his sufferings entirely to himself. 
Seryozha (Sergei) is clever; he has a systematic mind and 
is sensitive to artistic impressions, does his lessons splen- 

1 Nikoldi. 

3 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

didly, is athletic and lively at games, but gauche and 
absent-minded. He lacks independent-mindedness ; is a 
slave to his physical condition; according to whether he is 
well or unwell he is two quite different boys. . . . 

Ilya, the third, has never been ill in his life ; broad-boned, 
white and pink, radiant, bad at lessons. Is always think- 
ing about what he is told not to think about. Invents his 
own games. Hot-tempered and "violent," ^ wants to fight at 
once; but is also tender-hearted and very sensitive. Sen- 
suous ; fond of eating and lying still doing nothing. When 
he eats currant-jelly and buck-wheat kasha ^ his lips itch. 
Independent-minded in everything. When he cries, is vi- 
cious and horrid at the same time; when he laughs every 
one laughs too. Everything forbidden delights him; he 
recognizes it at once. 

Not long ago when I was writing stories for my "Alpha- 
bet" ^ he concocted one of his own : "A boy asked, 'Does 
God also . . ,?' As a punishment, for the rest of his life, 
God made the boy , . ." If I die, Ilya will come to grief, 
unless he has some stern guardian whom he loves to lead 
him by the hand. 

In the summer we used to ride out to bathe; Seryozha 
went on horseback by himself and I took Ilya on the saddle 
in front of me, I went out one morning and found both 
waiting. Ilya with his hat on, bath-towel and all complete, 
in the best of spirits, Seryozha came running up from 
somewhere, out of breath and hatless, "Find your hat or 
I won't take you," Seryozha ran hither and thither; there 

2 "Violent." Tolstoy uses the French or English word. 

^' Kasha, a kind of dry porridge. 

* The "Alphabet" published in 1872 in four parts, besides an illus- 
trated alphabet and a syllabary, contains several tales and fables, 
together with extracts from various church and secular books. 

4 




YASNAYA POLYANA 




THE GATES OF YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was no hat to be found. "There 's nothing for it ; I won't 
take you without a hat ; serve you right, it 's a lesson ; you 're 
always losing things." He was on the verge of tears. I 
rode off with Ilya and waited to see if he would show he 
was sorry for his brother. Not a bit. He beamed with 
happiness and chatted about the horse. My wife found 
Seryozha in tears. She searched for the hat ; it could n't 
be found. She guessed that her brother, who went out early 
to fish, had gone off with Seryozha's hat. She wrote me a 
note, saying that Seryozha was probably innocent about the 
hat and sent him to me in a cap.^ (She had guessed right.) 
I heard hurried footsteps on the bridge of the bathing- 
place; Seryozha ran in — he had lost the note on the way — 
and began sobbing. Then Ilya followed suit, and I did 
too, a little. 

Tanya (Tatyana) is eight years old. Every one says 
that she is like Sonya,® and I believe them, although I am 
pleased about that too; I believe it only because it is 
obvious. If she had been Adam's eldest daughter and he 
had had no other children afterwards she would have passed 
a wretched childhood. The greatest pleasure that she has is 
to look after children. She evidently finds a physical satis- 
faction in holding and touching a little human body. The 
dream of her life, consciously by now, is to have children. 
The other day I drove her into Tula to have her photo- 
graphed. She begged me to buy a knife for Seryozha, 
something else for this one, something else for that. She 
knows exactly what will give each the greatest pleasure. I 
bought nothing for her; she never thought about herself 
for a moment. As we were driving home I asked her; 

^ Kartuz, the ordinary peaked cap, yachting shape, that Russian 
workmen wear. 

6 Tolstoy's wife, Sofya Andreyevna. 

7 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Are you asleep, Tanya?" "No." "What are you think- 
ing about ?'* "I was thinking, when we get home, I '11 ask 
mama if Lyolya (Lyof ) has been good, and how I '11 
give him his present, and how I '11 give the others theirs, 
and how Seryozha will pretend he 's not a bit glad, but 
really will be, very." She is not very clever, she is not 
fond of using her mind, but she has a good mental appara- 
tus. She will be a splendid woman if God sends her a 
husband. I am prepared to pay a handsome reward to any 
one who will turn her into a "new woman." 

The fourth is Lyof. Handsome, dexterous, good mem- 
ory, graceful. Any clothes fit him as if they had been 
made for him. Everything that others do, he does very 
skilfully and well. Does not understand much yet. 

The fifth, Masha (Mary) is two years old, the one whose 
birth nearly cost Sonya her life. A weak and sickly child. 
Body white as milk, curly white hair; big queer blue eyes, 
queer by reason of their deep serious expression. Very in- 
telligent and ugly. She will be one of the riddles ; she will 
suffer, she will seek and find nothing; will always be seek- 
ing what is least attainable. 

The sixth, Peter, is a giant, a huge delightful baby in a 
mobcap ; '' turns out his elbows, strives eagerly after some- 
thing. My wife falls into an ecstasy of agitation and 
emotion when she holds him in her arms, but I am com- 
pletely at a loss to understand. I know that he has a great 
store of physical energy, but whether there is any purpose 
for which the store is wanted I do not know. That is why 
I do not care for children under two or three — I don't un- 
derstand. 

■^He died in 1873.— I. T. (The notes signed "I. T." are by the 
author; the rest are by the translator.) 

8 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

This letter was written in 1872, when I was six 
years old. My recollections date from about that 
time, but I can remember a few things before. 

For instance, I remember how my father had a 
heated argument with somebody about the result of 
the Franco-Prussian War ; I remember what room this 
was in and by what table. But I cannot remember 
whom the argument was with. I was only three and 
a half years old. 

From my earliest childhood, until the family 
moved into Moscow — that was in 1881 — all my life 
was spent, almost without a break, at Yasnaya 
Polyana. 

This was how we lived. The chief personage in 
the house was my mother. She settled everything. 
She interviewed Nikolai, the cook, and ordered din- 
ner; she sent us out for walks, made our shirts, was 
always nursing some baby at the breast; all day long 
she bustled about the house with hurried steps. 
One could be naughty with her, though she was some- 
times angry and punished us. 

She knew more about everything than anybody 
else. She knew that one must wash every day, that 
one must eat soup at dinner, that one must talk 
French, learn not to crawl about on all fours, and not 
to put one's elbows on the table ; and if she said that 
one was not to go out for a walk because it was just 
going to rain, she was sure to be right, and one had 

9 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

to do as she said. When I coughed she gave me 
licorice or King of Denmark drops ; ^ so I was very- 
fond of coughing. When my mother put me to bed 
and went upstairs to play duets with father, I found 
it very hard to go to sleep; I was annoyed at being 
left alone; so I used to start coughing and go on 
until nurse went and fetched mama, and I was 
very angry at her taking so long to come. I entirely 
refused to go to sleep until she had come to my rescue 
and measured out exactly ten drops in a wine-glass 
and given them to me. 

Papa was the cleverest man in the world. He al- 
ways knew everything. There was no being naughty 
with him. When he was up in his study "working," 
one was not allowed to make a noise, and nobody 
might go into his room. What he did when he was 
at "work," none of us knew. Later on, when I had 
learnt to read, I was told that papa was a "writer." 
It was like this. I was very pleased with some lines 
of poetry one day, and asked my mother who wrote 
them. She told me they were written by Pushkin, 
and Pushkin was a great writer. I was vexed at 
my father not being one, too. Then my mother said 
that my father was also a well-known writer, and I 
was very glad indeed. 

At the dinner-table papa sat opposite mama and 

8 King of Denmark drops, a concoction of licorice still common 
in Russia as a remedy for coughs. 

10 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

had his own round silver spoon. When old Natalia 
Petrovna, who lived on the floor below, with Great- 
Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna, poured herself out a 
glass of quass, he would pick it up and drink it right 
off, and then say, "Oh, I'm so sorry, Natalia 
Petrovna; I made a mistake!" We all laughed de- 
lightedly, and it seemed odd that papa was not in the 
least afraid of Natalia Petrovna. When there was 
jelly for dinner, papa said it was good for gluing 
paper boxes ; we ran off to get some paper, and papa 
made it into boxes. Mama was angry, but he was 
not afraid of her either. We had the gayest times 
imaginable with him now and then. He could ride 
a horse better and run faster than anybody else, 
and there was no one in the world as strong as he 
was. 

He hardly ever punished us, but when he looked 
me in the eyes he knew everything that I thought, 
and I was frightened. You could tell stories to 
mama but not to papa because he would see 
through you at once. So nobody ever tried. 

He knew all our secrets too. When we played at 
houses under the lilac-bushes, we had three great 
secrets, which nobody knew but Seryozha, Tanya, 
and me. All of a sudden up came papa one day and 
said that he knew all our three secrets and they all 
began with a B, which was perfectly true. The first 
secret was that mama was going to have another 

11 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Baby; the second, that Seryozha was in love with a 
Baroness ; and the third I forget. 

Besides papa and mama, there was also Aunt 
Tatyana Alexandrovna Yergolski. She lived on the 
floor below, in a corner room, with Natalia Petrovna, 
and had a big eikon with a silver mount. We were 
very much afraid of this eikon, because it was very 
old and black. 

Aunt Tatyana always lay on her bed and when we 
visited her gave us jam out of a green jar. She was 
Seryozha's godmother and fonder of him than of the 
rest. She died soon after and we were taken down 
to see her, lying in her coffin, looking as if she were 
made of wax. There were wax candles alight about 
the coffin and in front of the eikon, and it was all very 
terrifying. Mama told us we were not to be fright- 
ened; she and papa were not; but we huddled to- 
gether and kept close to mama. 

The room was occupied afterwards by our grand- 
mother, Pelageya Ilymitchna; she also had the black 
eikon and also died there. 

It was a low-roofed room, and opposite the window 
outside was a well, enormously deep and very terrify- 
ing. Mama said we were not to go near it because 
one might tumble in and get drowned. A bucket fell 
in once and they had great difficulty in getting it out 
again. 

Then there was an Englishwoman, Hannah, who 

12 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

lived in the house. She was good-tempered and very 
pretty. We were fond of her and did what she told 
us. At Christmas, when we had the Christmas tree, 
she made us a "plum pudding." It was brought to 
the table soused in rum, all in flames. When we 
walked in the garden with Hannah we were very 
good and did not dirty ourselves on the grass; but 
once when they sent Dunyasha ^ out with us, we ran 
away among the shrubs. She called after us : "Keep 
on the path! Keep on the path!" So we nick- 
named her Dunyasha-keep-on-the-path. Another 
Dunyasha was a housemaid who never could remem- 
ber anything; so we called her Dunyasha-can't- 
remember. The third Dunyasha, wife to the bailiff 
Alexey Stepanytch, was known as Dunyasha-mama- 
has-come-on-business. 

She lived on the ground floor of the annex ^^ and 
always kept the door locked. When we went with 
mama to see her, we used to knock at the door and 
call out, "Dunyasha, mama has come on business." 
Then she opened the oil-cloth door and let us in. 
We loved to be given tea with jam in it when we 
went to see her. She gave us the jam in a saucer, 

^ Dunya, Dunyasha, is a familiar form for Avdotya, which is the 
Russian version of the Greek Eudoxia. 

10 The Russian word "fligel," though identical with the German 
"fliigel," does not as a rule mean a "wing" of a house in the Eng- 
lish sense, but a separate building of inferior splendor, immediately 
adjoining. 

13 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and she had only one silver spoon; it was small and 
thin and all chewed out of shape. We knew the 
reason of that; the pig found it in the rinsing-tub 
and chewed it up. 

When I ceased to be a baby and reached the age 
of five, my mother began to give me reading and 
writing lessons. First of all I did my lessons in 
Russian, but after a little while in French and Eng- 
lish. Papa himself taught me arithmetic. I had 
already heard of Seryozha's and Tanya's lessons and 
I was a good deal alarmed; for sometimes when 
Seryozha could not understand a thing, papa would 
say that he did not understand on purpose. Then 
Seryozha would pucker up his eyes and begin to cry. 
Sometimes I could not understand a thing either, and 
he used to get very angry with me. At the begin- 
ning of the lesson he was always good-tempered and 
made little jokes; but when it became difficult and he 
had to explain, I was frightened and could not under- 
stand a word. 

When I was six, I remember my father teaching 
the village children. They had their lessons in "the 
other house," ^^ where Alexey Stepanytch, the bailiff, 
lived, and sometimes on the ground floor of the house 
we lived in. 

There were a great number of these children who 
used to come. When they came, the front hall smelt 

11 The name we gave to the stone fligel, or annex. — I. T. 

14 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of sheep-skin jackets; they were taught by papa and 
Seryozha and Tanya and Uncle Kostya ^^ all at 
once. Lesson time was very gay and lively. 

The children did exactly as they pleased, sat where 
they liked, ran about from place to place, and 
answered questions not one by one, but all together, 
interrupting one another and helping one another to 
recall what they had read. If one left out a bit, up 
jumped another and then another, and the story or 
sum was reconstructed by the united efforts of the 
whole class. 

What pleased my father most about his pupils 
was the picturesqueness and originality of their lan- 
guage. He never wanted a literal repetition of 
bookish expressions, and particularly encouraged 
everything " out of your own head." I remember 
how he once stopped a boy who was running into 
the next room. 

"Where are you off to?" he asked. 

"To uncle, to bite off a piece of chalk." ^^ 

"Cut along, cut along ! It 's not for us to teach 
them, but for them to teach us," he said to some one 
when the boy was gone. "Which of us would have 

12 Konstantin Islavin. See Chapter V. 

13 The instinct for lime, necessary to feed their bones, drives 
Russian children to nibble pieces of chalk or the whitewash off 
the wall. In this case the boy is running to one of the grown-ups 
about the house, probably to the Dvornik or yardman (every one 
is "Uncle" to a Russian child) to bite at a piece of the chalk he 
had for whitewashing. 

17 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

expressed himself like that^ You see he did n't 
say to 'get' or to 'break off' but to 'bite off,' which 
is right, because they do literally 'bite' off the chalk 
from the lump with their teeth, and don't 'break' 
it off." 

One day my father set me to teach a boy his alpha- 
bet. I did my very best but he could n't understand 
it in the least. I lost my temper and hit him; he 
hit back, and we fought and both cried. Papa 
came up and told me I was not to teach any more 
because I did n't know how. I was naturally very 
angry and went and told my mother that it was n't 
my fault, because Tanya and Seryozha had clever 
boys to teach, but mine was a nasty stupid one. 



18 



CHAPTER II 

THE HOUSEHOLD. NIKOLAI THE COOK. ALEXEY 
STEPANYTCH. AGAFYA MIKHAILOVNA. MARYA 
AFANASYEVNA. SERGEI PETROVITCH. 

I CAME into the world at the period when our 
household still consisted of those who had 
formerly been serfs of the family. They are 
all dead and buried now, but I am going to tell about 
them, because so many of my recollections of my 
childhood and of my father are bound up with 
them. 

When my father married and brought home his 
young and inexperienced bride, Sofya Andreyevna, to 
Yasnaya Polyana, Nikolai Mikhailovitch Rumyan- 
tsef, ex-flute-player in Prince Nikolai Sergeyevitch 
Volkonski's orchestra of serfs, was already estab- 
lished as cook. 

When we asked him, as children, why he had given 
up playing the flute, he told us he had lost the 
"embouchure^'^^ so they made him a cook. Before 
my father's marriage, he had a salary of five rubles a 

1 "Embouchure," a technical term; in order to play wind instru- 
ments, the player has to be able to adjust his lips in a particular 
way.— I. T. 

19 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

month; but when my mother arrived, she raised him 
to six, at which rate he continued the rest of his days ; 
that is, till somewhere about the end of the eighties.^ 
He was succeeded in the kitchen by his son, Seymon 
Nikolayevitch, my mother's godson, and this worthy 
and beloved man, companion of my childish games, 
still lives with us to this day. Under my mother's 
supervision he prepared my father's vegetarian diet 
with affectionate zeal, and without him, who knows ^ 
my father would very likely never have lived to the 
ripe old age he did. During his latter years my 
father never felt well except at Yasnaya, and every 
time he went away and had to take to a diet he was 
not accustomed to he was attacked by gastric 
troubles. 

Nikolai, the father, was a typical serf, with all the 
serf's good and bad qualities. He was dirty and 
fond of liquor; he often got so drunk that his wife 
had to come and do the cooking for him; but his 
reverence for the "masters" extended to deep obei- 
sances and he was afraid of them. He was one of 
those folk of the old generation — ^and I have met 
with many such in my time — who regretted the old 
days of serfdom and dependence, and by no means 
rejoiced in the Emancipation. "We were better 
off then," he would say; "we were strictly kept, we 
had to mind our P's and Q's, but they looked after 

2 His salary was raised from about nine pounds a year to eleven. 

20 




TOLSTOY AS A YOUNG MAN 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

us well. In the old days you knew you would 
never starve. But now, if they turn me out from 
here, and I have to leave my master, where will I 
go to?" 

We enjoyed running into the kitchen to get him to 
give us hot pies or levdshniks. His levdshniks were 
made of pastry with jam inside. To prevent their 
"settling," Nikolai used to blow into them from one 
corner, not through a straw, but with his lips. This 
process was known as " les soupirs de Nicolas." 

Our French teacher. Monsieur Nief, killed a 
kozyula or viper one day in the garden and cut off 
its head with his penknife, and in order to prove to 
us that its flesh was not poisonous, he resolved to 
fry it and eat it. We all followed him to the 
kitchen. He showed Nikolai Mikhailovitch the 
viper, which hung from his hand, and asked him, in 
broken Russian, to lend him a frying-pan. We 
peeped in from the doorway and wondered what the 
result would be. 

For a long time Nikolai Mikhailovitch could not 
make out what the Frenchman wanted with him. 
When it dawned on him at last he picked up a cook- 
ing-shovel ^ from the corner, and brandishing it over 
Monsieur Nief's head, bellowed: "Get out, you 
heathen; I'll teach you to defile the master's pots 

3 Tchdpelnik, a long-handled shovel used for putting the frying- 
pan on the stove and lifting it off. 

23 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and pans ! Away with you ! The other day it was 
a squirrel he brought to fry, and now it 's come to a 
viper. Away !" 

"Qu-est-ce qu'il dit^ qu'est-ce qu'il dit^" asked 
Monsieur Nief, backing in some alarm. We were 
delighted, and ran away laughing to tell mama all 
about it. 



Alexey Stepanovitch Oryekhof, also a former serf, 
was a peasant proprietor of Yasnaya. 

When my father went to Sebastopol he took him 
with him as his orderly. 

I remember my father telling me that during the 
siege he was quartered in the Fourth Bastion with a 
brother officer who also had a man-servant, and this 
man-servant was a terrible coward. When they sent 
him to the soldiers' mess to get the dinner,^ he used 
to duck and dodge in the most ridiculous manner, to 
avoid the flying shells and bullets; whereas Alexey 
Stepanovitch was not in the least afraid and walked 
boldly across. 

So they gave up sending Alexey on any errands 
and always sent the coward; and all the officers used 
to turn out to see him crawling and crouching and 
ducking at every step. 

By my time, Alexey Stepanovitch had become 

* On active service, officers and men share the same mess. 

24 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

bailiff or manager at Yasnaya Polyana. He and 
Dunyasha lived together in "the other house." 

He was a grave, staid man ; we had a great respect 
for him and wondered at papa's thee-ing and thou-ing 
him. 

I will tell about his death later on. 



Agafya Mikhailovna was an old woman who lived 
at first in the kitchen of "the other house" and after- 
wards on the home farm. Tall and thin with big, 
thoroughbred eyes, and long straight hair, like a 
witch, turning gray, she was rather terrifying, but, 
above all, she was queer. 

Once upon a time long ago she had been house- 
maid to my father's grandmother, Countess Pelageya 
Nikolayevna Tolstoy, nee Princess Gortchakof. 
She was fond of talking about her young days. 

"I was very handsome," she used to say. "When 
there were gentlefolks visiting at the big house, the 
Countess would call me, 'Gachette [Agafya], femme 
de chambre, apportez-moi un mouchoirl' Then I 
would say, 'Toute suite, Madame la Comtesse!' 
And every one would stare at me and not be able to 
take their eyes off. When I crossed over to the 
Annex, there they would be, watching to catch me on 
the way. Many a time have I tricked them; run 
round the other way and jumped over the ditch. I 

25 



. REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

never liked that sort of thing any time. A maid I 
was, a maid I am." 

After my grandmother's death, Agafya Mikhai- 
lovna was sent on to the home farm for some reason 
or other, and minded the sheep. She got so fond of 
sheep that all her days after she never could touch 
mutton. 

Next to the sheep, she had an affection for dogs, 
and that is the only period of her life that I remember 
her in. 

There was nothing in the world she cared about 
but dogs. She lived with them in horrible dirt and 
smells and gave up her whole mind and soul to them. 
We always had setters, harriers, and greyhounds, and 
the whole kennel, often very numerous, was under 
Agafya Mikhailovna's management, with some boy 
or other to help her, usually a very clumsy and stupid 
one. 

There are many interesting recollections bound up 
with the memory of this intelligent and original 
woman. Most of them are associated in my mind 
with the stories my father told me about her. He 
could always catch and unravel any interesting 
psychological trait, and these traits, which he would 
mention incidentally, stuck firmly in my mind. He 
used to tell, for instance, how Agafya Mikhailovna 
complained to him of sleeplessness, 

"Ever since I can remember her, she has suffered, 

26 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

she saySj from 'a birch-tree growing inside me from 
my belly up; it presses against my chest, and pre- 
vents my breathing.' She complained one day of 
her sleeplessness and the birch-tree, and said : 'There 
I lay all alone, and all was quiet but the clock ticking 
on the wall: "Who are you'? What are you'? 
Who are you'? What are you^" ^ it said. And I 
began to think: "Who am I? What am IV and 
so I spent the whole night thinking about it.' 

"Why, just imagine! This is yvwdc aeaozov^ 'Know 
thyself,' this is Socrates !" added my father, telling 
the story with great enthusiasm. 

In the summer-time my mother's brother, Styopa 
(Stephen Behrs), who was studying at the time in 
the school of jurisprudence, used to come and stay 
with us. In the autumn he used to go out coursing 
with greyhounds, with my father and us, and Agafya 
Mikhailovna loved him for that. 

Styopa's examination was in the spring. Agafya 
Mikhailovna knew about it and anxiously waited 
for the news of whether he had got through. 

One day she put up a candle before the eikon and 
prayed that Styopa might pass. But at that mo- 
ment she remembered that her greyhounds had got 
out and had not come back to the kennels again. 

" 'Saints in heaven !' I said to myself, 'they '11 get 
in to some place and worry the cattle and do a mis- 

5 Russian : Kto ty, tchto ty, kto ty, tchto ty. 

29 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

chief! Lord, let my candle bum for the dogs to 
come back quick, and I '11 buy another for Stepan 
Andreyevitch.' And no sooner had I said it than I 
heard the dogs rattling their collars in the porch. 
Thank God! they had come back. You see what 
prayer can do." 

Another favorite of Agafya Mikhailovna was a 
young man, Misha Stakhovitch,^ who often stayed 
with us. 

"See what you have been and done to me, little 
Countess!" she said reproachfully to my sister 
Tanya: "You've introduced me to Mikhail Alex- 
androvitch and I 've fallen in love with him in my 
old age, like a wicked woman!" 

On the fifth of February, her name-day,"^ Agafya 
Mikhailovna received a telegram of congratulation 
from Stakhovitch. 

When my father heard of it he said jokingly to 
Agafya Mikhailovna: "Are n't you ashamed that a 
man had to trudge two miles through the frost at 
night, all for the sake of your telegram?" 

6 Mikhail Alexandrovitch Stakhovitch, born in 1861, a landowner 
of Oryol Province. Now one of the foremost politicians of Russia: 
Member of the First and Second Dumas, and appointed later to 
the Senate. He is chiefly known for a speech of 1906, recommend- 
ing tolerance to both parties, the revolutionaries and the reaction- 
aries, which naturally excited the indignation of both. 

''' Name-day. That is, the day of the saint whose name she 
received at baptism, celebrated as we celebrate birthdays. Feb- 
ruary 5th is the festival of St. Agatha (Agafya). 



30 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Trudge, trudge? Angels bore him on their 
wings. Trudge indeed! You get three telegrams 
from an outlandish Jew woman," she growled, "and 
telegrams every day about your Golokhvotika ; 
never a trudge then; but I get name-day greetings, 
and it 's 'trudge' !" 

And one could not but acknowledge that she was 
right. This telegram, the only one in the whole 
year that was addressed to the kennels, by the 
pleasure it gave Agafya Mikhailovna was certainly 
far more important than some news or other about a 
ball given in Moscow in honor of a Jewish banker's 
daughter, or about Olga Andreyevna Golokvastovy's 
arrival at Yasnaya. 

When Alexey Stepanovitch, the bailiff, was dying, 
he lay all alone in his room, and Agafya Mikhai- 
lovna used to come and sit with him for hours, nurs- 
ing him and entertaining him with conversation. He 
was ill for a long time, with cancer of the stomach, I 
believe. His wife, Dunyasha-mama-has-come-on- 
business, had died some years before. 

On one of the long winter evenings when Alexey 
Stepanytch lay in bed, and Agafya Mikhailovna sat 
beside him making tea for him, they discoursed of 
death and agreed that whichever of them died first 
would tell the other, when the moment came, whether 
it was a pleasant thing to die. 

When Alexey Stepanytch lost all his strength and 

31 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

it was evident that death was near, Agafya Mikhai- 
lovna was mindful of their conversation, and asked 
him if he was happy. 

"Very, very happy, Agafya Mikhailovna," he an- 
swered, and those were almost his last words. This 
was in 1882. 

She was fond of telling this story, and I had it 
both from her and from my father. My father was 
always extraordinarily curious and attentive about 
the sensations of the dying, and, whenever he could, 
picked up the smallest details about their experi- 
ences. 

He associated the story in his mind with the mem- 
ory of his elder brother Dmitry, of whom he was very 
fond, and with whom he entered into a compact that 
whichever of them died first would come back after 
death and tell the other of his life "beyond." But 
Dmitry Nikolayevitch died fifty years before my 
father and never came back to tell the tale. 

Agafya Mikhailovna did not confine her affection 
to dogs. She had a mouse that used to come out 
when she had tea and pick up the bread crumbs on the 
table. 

Once we picked a quantity of wild strawberries, 
clubbed threepence together for a pound of sugar, and 
made Agafya Mikhailovna a jar of jam. She was 
very pleased and thanked us warmly. 

"All of a sudden," she told us, "as I sat down to 

32 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

my tea and put out my hand for the j am, I found the 
mouse in the jam-pot. I took her out, washed her 
well with warm water, struggle as she might, and 
then let her go on the table again." 

"And the jam?' 

"I threw the jam away. A mouse is a heathen ^ 
beast, I would n't eat anything a mouse had been at." 

Agafya Mikhailovna died at the beginning of the 
nineties. There were no more hounds or sporting 
dogs at Yasnaya then, but she gave shelter to a 
motley collection of mongrels, and tended and fed 
them till the end of her days.^ 

I recall with gratitude the memory of my old nurse, 
Marya Af anasyevna, a colorless but good old woman, 
who nursed the five eldest of us. She had the keys 
of the store-room and we delighted in running to her 
room to ask for "Almonds an' 'aisins." 

Her son, Sergei Petrovitch Arbuzof, was our foot- 
man for many years, and it was with him that my 
father afterwards used to go on his visits to the Opta 
Hermitage. ^^ He was a carpenter by handicraft, 

s "Heathen," pogdny, from the Latin paganus; "of the devil," 
"unclean" in the Pentateiichal sense. 

^ Readers of "Anna Karenina" may remember that Tolstoy gave 
the name Agafya Mikhailovna to Levin's housekeeper, doubtless in 
memory of this old member of his own household. 

^^ A famous and populous "Hermitage" — something after the 
manner of the hermitage in the Thebaid described by Anatole 
France — said to have been founded in the 14th century by Opta, 
a repentant brigand. Tolstoy paid frequent visits to the Hermitage 
when he was searching for a religion. 

33 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was liable to bouts of drink and wore bright red 
whiskers. 

Her other son, Pavel, was a bootmaker, lived in 
the village and was my father's first teacher when 
he took up bootmaking. 



34 



CHAPTER III 

YASNAYA POLYANA. THE HOUSE. PORTRAITS OF 
ANCESTORS. MY FATHER'S STUDY. 

I CAN remember the house at Yasnaya Polyana 
as it was during the first years after my father's 
marriage. 

It was one of the two-storied stone wings of the 
old mansion-house of the Princes Volkonski/ which 
my father had sold for pulling down when he was 
still a bachelor. 

From what my father has told me, I know that 
the house in which he was born and spent his youth 
was a three-storied building with thirty-six rooms. 
On the spot where it stood, between the two wings, 
the remains of the old stone foundation are still vis- 
ible in the form of trenches filled with rubble, and 
the site is covered with big sixty-year-old trees which 
my father planted himself. 

1 The possession of a stone house in Russia, where wood is the 
usual material for building, gives an exceptional feeling of con- 
tinuity and hereditary grandeur. "The existence of an old-estab- 
lished family residence, in which each successive owner has left 
some evidence of his own personality, a family monument, which 
every member regards with a feeling of affection and pride, is 
a rare exception in the rural districts." — F. H. E. Palmer, "Russian 
Life in Town and Country," 1901. 

35 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

When any one asked my father where he was born, 
he used to point to a tall larch which grew on the 
site of the old foundations. 

"Up there, where the top of that larch waves," he 
used to say; "that's where my mother's room was, 
where I was born on a leather sofa." 

It was strange to look up and see the slender tree- 
top and imagine that there was a room up there once, 
and that in it stood the walnut and leather sofa on 
which we older ones were born, and which now 
stands in my father's study; and that once, long ago, 
my father was a little child and had a mama just 
like we had. Only my father could not remember 
his mother. She died when he was only two years 
old and he only knew about her from what he had 
been told by his relatives. 

She was small and ugly, but she had big clear eyes, 
full of light and kindness. 

She had a wonderfully entertaining way of telling 
children's stories and my father used to say that it 
was from her that his eldest brother Nikolai inherited 
his cleverness. 

My father seldom spoke of his mother, but when 
he did, it was delightful to hear him, because the men- 
tion of her awoke an unusual strain of gentleness and 
tenderness in him. There was such a ring of re- 
spectful affection, so much reverence for her memory 

36 




PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE FAMILY 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in his words, that we all looked on her as a sort of 
saint. 

My father was nine when his father died, and he 
remembered him well. He loved him too, and 
always spoke of him reverently; but I always felt 
that his mother's memory, although he had never 
known her, was dearer to him, and his love for her far 
greater than for his father. 

Even to this day I do not know the story of the 
sale of the old house exactly. My father never liked 
talking about it, and for that reason I could never 
make up my mind to ask him the details of the trans- 
action. I only know that the house was sold by one 
of his relatives, who had charge of his affairs by 
power of attorney, when he was in the Caucasus, for 
5000 paper roubles.^ 

It was said to have been sold to pay off my father's 
gambling debts. That is quite true. 

My father told me himself that at one time he was 
a great card-player, that he lost large sums of money 
and that his financial affairs were considerably em- 
barrassed. 

The only thing about which I am in doubt is 
whether it was with my father's cognizance or by his 
directions that the house was sold; or whether the 
relative in question did not exceed his instructions 

2 About £600. 

39 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and decide on the sale of his own initiative — the most 
probable explanation. 

My father cherished his parents' memory to such 
an extent, and had such a warm affection for every- 
thing relating to his own childhood that it is hard to 
believe that he would have raised his hand against 
the house in which he had been born and brought up 
and in which his mother had spent her whole 
life. 

Knowing my father as I do I think he very likely 
wrote to his relative from the Caucasus : "Sell some- 
thing," not in the least expecting that he would 
sell the house, and that he afterwards took the 
blame for it on himself. Is that not the reason why 
he was always so unwilling to talk about it'? 

In 1871, when I was five years old, the zala ^ and 
study were built onto the house. 

I well remember the masons at their work, the 
knocking of the door-ways through the walls of the 
old house, and, especially clearly, the laying of the 
parquet floors. I enjoyed sitting on the floor where 
the carpenters were at work, watching them fitting in 
the oak slats, planing them, smearing them with their 

3 The zala Is the chief room of a house, corresponding to the 
English drawing-room, but on a grand scale. The gostinaya — 
literally "guest-room" — usually translated as "drawing-room" — 
is a place for more intimate receptions. At Yasnaya Polyana meals 
were taken in the zala but this is not the general Russian custom, 
houses being provided also with a stoUvaya or dining-room. 



40 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

smelly glue and knocking them tight into the mortises 
with their hammers. 

When they had finished the parquet and waxed it 
over, it was so slippery, one was afraid to walk on 
it. And when it began to dry, it used to go off at 
times with loud reports like gun-shots ; if I was alone 
in the room this was always too much for me, and I 
took to my heels. 

The walls of the zala were hung with old ancestral 
portraits.^ They were rather alarming, and I was 
afraid of them at first; but we got used to them after 
a time and I grew quite fond of one of them, of my 
great-grandfather Ilya Andreyevitch Tolstoy, because 
I was told that I was like him. He had a fat, good- 
natured face. My father told me that he used to 
send his linen abroad to be washed, that he was im- 
mensely hospitable, jovial, and generous, and that he 
squandered the whole of his wife's enormous fortune. 

Beside him hung the portrait of another great- 
grandfather. Prince Nikolai Sergeyevitch Volkonski, 
my grandmother's father, with thick, black eyebrows, 
a gray wig, and a red kaftan? This Volkonski built 
all the buildings of Yasnaya Polyana. He was a 
model squire, intelligent and proud, and enjoyed the 
immense respect of all the neighborhood. 

* Quite an unusual feature, even in the noblest Russian houses. 
5 Kaftan, a long coat of various cuts, including the military and 
naval frock-coat and the long gown worn by coachmen. 



41 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

On another wall, between the doors, a big portrait 
of the blind old Prince Gortchakof, father to my 
great-grandmother, Pelageya Nikolayevna Tolstoy, 
Ilya Andreyevitch's wife, filled the whole bay. He 
was represented sitting at a semi-circular table with 
his eyes shut, and about him, on both sides, lay 
pocket-handkerchiefs which he kept by him to wipe 
his watery eyes with. 

He was said to have been very rich and very av- 
aricious. He was fond of counting his money and 
spent whole days going through his bank-notes. 
When he lost his sight, he used to make one of his 
familiars, the only person he trusted, bring him his 
cherished mahogany casket, which he unlocked with 
the key he kept on his person, and went on fingering 
the old crumpled notes over and over again. While 
he was so engaged, his confidant used secretly to steal 
the notes one by one from the heap and slip pieces of 
newspaper into their place. And the old man went 
on fumbling the pieces of newspaper with his thin 
tremulous fingers and believed that he was still count- 
ing money. 

Further along hung the portrait of a nun with a 
rosary, mother of Gortchakof, nee Princess Mordkin, 
born in 1705; another, of Nikolai Volkonski's wife, 
nee Princess Trubetskoy ; and another, of Volkonski's 
father, who laid out the park and planted the lime- 
walks and prishpekts or avenues. 

42 




TOLSTOY S ROOM OX THE GROUND FLOOR AT YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

On the ground floor under the zala^ next to the 
entrance hall, my father built his study. He had a 
semi-circular niche made in the wall and stood a 
marble bust of his favorite dead brother Nikolai in it. 
This bust was made abroad from a death-mask, and 
my father told us that it was very like, because it was 
done by a good sculptor according to his own direc- 
tions. He had a kind and rather plaintive face. 
The hair was brushed smooth like a child's with the 
parting on one side. The bust had no beard or 
mustache, and it was white and very, very clean. 

My father's study was divided in two by a par- 
tition of big bookshelves, containing a multitude of 
all sorts of books. In order to support the shelves, 
they were connected by big wooden beams, and 
between them was a thin birch-wood door, behind 
which stood my father's writing-table and his old- 
fashioned circular arm-chair. 

These two connecting beams still exist. I am 
afraid to look at them even now, because I know that 
once my father wanted to hang himself on them. 

The walls were adorned with antlers, which my 
father brought back from the Caucasus, and a stuffed 
stag's head. He used the antlers to hang his hat and 
his towel on. 

There were portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer 
and Fet ^ as a young man on the walls, too, and the 

^ Afandsyi Shenshin the poet, who adopted his mother's name 

45 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

well-known group of writers of the "Sovremennik" '^ 
circle in 1856, with Turgenyef, Ostrovski, Gont- 
charof, Grigorovitch, Druzhinin, and my father, 
quite young still, without a beard, and in uniform. 

My father used to come out of his bedroom of a 
morning — it was in a corner on the top floor — in his 
dressing-gown, with his beard uncombed and tumbled 
together, and go downstairs to dress. Soon after, he 
would issue from his study fresh and vigorous, in a 
gray smock-frock, and go up into the zala for break- 
fast. This was our only meal before dinner. 

When there was nobody staying in the house he 
would not stop long in the drawing-room, but would 
take his tumbler of tea and carry it off to his study 
with him. But if there were friends and guests with 
us, he would get interested in the conversation, and 
not be able to tear himself away. With one hand 
thrust behind his leather belt, and with the other 
holding his silver tumbler-socket in front of him with 
a tumbler full of tea in it, he would stop at the door 
and remain rooted to the same spot for as much as 
half an hour, quite unaware that his tea was getting 

Fet, owing to official difficulties about his birth certificate. An 
intimate friend of Tolstoy's. See Chapter XIII, below. 

'^ The Sovremennik or CQntemporary Review, edited by the poet 
Nekrasof, was the rallying place of the "men of the forties," the 
new school of realists. Ostrovski is the dramatist; Druzhinin, 
the critic and editor ; Gontcharof the novelist, author of "Oblo- 
mof"; Grigorovitch wrote tales about peasant life, some of which 
are given in Beatrix Tolleraache's "Russian Sketches," 1913. 

46 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

perfectly cold, and talk and talk, and somehow it was 
always just then that the discussion grew most ani- 
mated and interesting. We all knew this spot by 
the door so well and knew for certain that when papa 
reached it, with his tumbler full of tea in his hand, he 
was sure to stop there with the intention of clinching 
the argument in a word or two, and the best part of 
the conversation would be only then beginning. 

At last he would go off to his work, and we all dis- 
persed, in winter to the different school-rooms, in 
summer to the croquet-lawn or somewhere about the 
garden. My mother would settle down in the zala 
to make clothes for the babies, or to copy out some- 
thing she had not finished overnight; and till three or 
four in the afternoon silence reigned in the house. 

Then my father would come out of his study and 
go off for his afternoon's exercise. Sometimes he 
took a dog and a gun with him, sometimes he rode 
and sometimes he merely went for a walk to the 
Crown Wood. 

At five the big bell rang that hung on the broken 
bough of an old elm-tree in front of the house and 
we all ran to wash our hands and go in to dinner. 

My father was very hungry as a rule and ate vora- 
ciously whatever turned up. My mother would try 
to stop him, and tell him not to waste all his appetite 
on kasha^ because there were chops and vegetables to 
follow, — "You '11 have a bad liver again," she would 

47 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

say, but he paid no attention to her and asked for 
more and more, until his hunger was completely satis- 
fied. Then he would tell us all about his walk: 
where he had put up a covey of black game, what new 
paths he had discovered in the Crown Wood beyond 
Kudeyarof Well, or, if he rode, how the young horse 
he was breaking in had begun to understand the reins 
and the pressure of the leg. He would relate all this 
in the most vivid and entertaining way, so that the 
time passed very gaily. 

"Mama, what's pudding to-day?" Tanya, who 
was always bold and independent, would suddenly 
ask. 

"Ilya's favorite, pancakes and jam," answered my 
mother quite seriously, not noticing the shade of 
mischief, only too frequent in Tanya's tone. 

I was sitting beside papa perhaps, and was afraid 
to take more than two pancakes. But it was quite 
safe to take it out in jam, because one could cover 
that up quickly with the other pancake and roll it all 
up out of sight. As soon as I had it all ready and 
was about to eat it, papa put out a surreptitious hand, 
snatched my plate away and said: "Come, you 've 
had plenty by now!" I didn't know whether to 
laugh or to cry. Fortunately papa looked me in the 
eyes and burst out laughing, or else I should have 
started bellowing. 

After dinner he would go back to his room to read, 

48 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and at eight we had tea, and the best hours of the day 
began — the evening hours, when everybody was gath- 
ered in the zala. The grown-ups talked or read 
aloud or played the piano, and we either listened to 
them or had some jolly game of our own, and in 
anxious fear awaited the moment when the English 
grandfather-clock on the landing would give a click 
and a buzz and slowly and clearly chime out ten. 

Perhaps mama would not notice. She was in the 
small drawing-room making a fair copy. 

"Come, children, bedtime ! Say good-night." 

''Oh, not yet, mama; just five minutes." 

"Run along, it's high time you were off; or there 
will be no getting you up in the morning to do your 
lessons." 

We would say a lingering good-night, on the look- 
out for any chance of delay, and at last would go 
downstairs to the room with the arches,^ very much 
aggrieved that we were children still and had to go to 
bed while the grown-ups could stay up as long as ever 
they liked. 

What did they do when we had gone'? I would 
wonder to myself. 

You might be sure that that was the very time that 

^ The nursery was on the ground floor, under the arches which 
supported the "balcony-room." This nursery was afterwards 
turned into Tolstoy's study, and it is there that he is represented 
in Repin's famous portrait at his writing-table, with his scythe 
and saw and shovel about him. 

51 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

things began to be j oiliest. Ah, no wonder papa was 
so fond of saying "when I grow up" ! Of course that 
was only his joke, because he was grown up and had 
everything a fellow could want. Oh, why was I not 
like him^ He had three guns, several Caucasian 
daggers, some dogs, and a horse; and he did n't have 
to do any lessons ; while I was still a child, and should 
remain one for a long time, and have to sleep in the 
nursery in the dark, with Marya Afanasyevna who 
had just blown out the tallow candle and told me to 
lie still and not fidget. "Shall I cry*? No, what 's 
the use^ I '11 stick my head under the bed-clothes 
and go to sleep." 

And I hardly had time to shut my eyes and forget 
where I was before it was morning, bright and happy 
morning. A host of pleasures lay before me; in a 
moment I should get up and dress, run out in the 
garden, where I and Tanya had dug a cellar and 
storehouse in the ground; and then I should go and 
chase butterflies in the long grass by the "Thicket." ^ 
I must certainly catch a swallow-tail, Seryozha had 
one and I had none. 

After that would follow lessons : but that was a de- 
tail ; there was no need to think about that; and after 
that breakfast, a bath, dinner. . . . 

How delightful life was! How brightly the sun 

9 The name given, for some reason, to a wood of ancient oak- 
trees, near the house at Yasnaya Polyana. 

52 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

shone ! How loud the nightingales sang under my 
windows! What a multitude of pleasures lay 
ahead! . . . 



53 



CHAPTER IV 



PROKHOR. ANKE PIE. 



I RETAIN very vivid recollections of the Christ- 
mas trees of our childhood. How gay it was 
when all the guests gathered at Christmas, the 
Dyakofs, the Fets, and Uncle Kostya, bringing us 
presents and heaps of sweetmeats ; for some days we 
lived in anxious expectation and preparation, guess- 
ing what presents each would get, and passed our time 
building castles in the air. 

Already two weeks before Christmas, mama would 
go into Tula, and buy a number of rough wooden 
dolls, and we set to work to make dresses for them. 
For this purpose she had been collecting remnants of 
various cloths, scraps of ribbon, and snippets of 
chintz and velvet, in the chest of drawers, for a whole 
year. She brought her big black bundle trium- 
phantly into the zala^ and we all sat at the round 
table, needle in hand, and spent hours busily sewing 
various petticoats, trowsers, and caps, and adorning 
them with gold lace and ribbon; and we were de- 
lighted when the naked strips of wood, with their 

54 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

stupid painted faces, turned into elegant, handsome 
boys and girls. One could not help thinking that 
when they were dressed up, their faces became more 
intelligent, and each acquired a certain characteristic 
and interesting expression. These dolls were pre- 
pared for the village children; we none of us knew 
what presents we were going to get ourselves. 

On Christmas Eve priests arrived and celebrated 
vespers. On Christmas Day we put on our best 
clothes when we got up, and in the zala^ instead of 
the dining-table, stood a big bushy Christmas tree 
filling the whole room with a pleasant wild forest 
smell of fir needles. We hurried over dinner, anx- 
ious to get done as quickly as possible and run back 
to our part of the house. Then the doors of the 
zala were locked and the grown-ups decorated the 
Christmas tree and spread out our presents on little 
tables. Twenty times in the afternoon we would 
go running to the door to ask if it would soon be 
ready and peep through the key-hole, and the time 
passed very very slowly. 

At last we were called. The door into the small 
drawing-room was unlocked and we all rushed 
through higgledy-piggledy into the zala. 

We were dazzled by the brilliant blaze of the 
Christmas-tree candles and stood bewildered, not 
knowing what to do next. But this lasted only for 
a second; one soon recovered one's wits, and went 

ss 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

to look for one's own table on which one's presents 
were laid neatly out; a doll that shut its eyes, a big 
pencil, a calendar, a pen-knife, a kitchen range with 
pots and pans, and so on. One examined every- 
thing carefully and ran to see what Tanya and 
Seryozha had got. Their presents were better still. 
Tanya's doll was bigger than mine, and shut its eyes 
like mine when you laid it flat ; but besides that there 
were two strings under its frock with blue beads at 
the end and when you pulled them it cried 'papa' 
and 'mama.' Seryozha had a gun which fired off a 
cork with a loud pop, and a tin watch with a chain 
to it. 

Meanwhile mama was distributing dolls and 
gingerbread to the village children. They had been 
let in by another door, and stood close together 
on the right hand side of the Christmas tree, with- 
out coming over to our part of the room. 

"Give me a doll, Auntie; Vanka has got one; I 've 
got nothing yet." 

"Wait a bit, wait a bit, the little ones first, the 
big ones afterwards. You ought to be ashamed to 
play with dolls, a great big boy like you; wait a 
bit; if they go round, you shall have one too," said 
mama to pacify him, trying to be fair to every one. 

Then one of the grown-ups sat down at the piano 
and struck up a lively trepdk} 

1 Trepak, a sort of brisk tripudium, with plenty of stamping in it. 

56 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Suddenly every one made way for an old man who 
appeared from no one knows where, with a long tow- 
beard, leading a bear on a rope. 

" Come along, Misha,^ give us a dance ! Show 
us how the village children steal peas from the 
kitchen garden I Show us how the old woman turns 
over on the top of the stove I Show us how the vil- 
lage girls paint their faces with white and red," 
he said, putting on a deep bass voice, and the bear 
danced and crawled and lay down on one side and 
turned slowly over. We looked round at all the 
grown-ups to make sure whether they were all still 
there, and suddenly noticed that papa was missing. 
He had been there a moment ago and we had never 
noticed him go. Then we guessed that this was he, 
playing the bear in a fur coat turned inside out, and 
we were no longer afraid of the bear, but came boldly 
up and stroked his shaggy coat. 

The first Christmas tree I remember was in the 
balcony room which my father used as a study in 
later years. After that it was always in the newly- 
built zala, 

I was five years old then. 

That year I was given a big porcelain tea cup and 
saucer. Mama knew that a tea cup and saucer 
had long been the dream of my life and she got it 
for me as a Christmas present. When I saw the 

2 Misha, diminutive of Michael, the Christian name of all bears. 

57 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

cup on my table I did not stop to examine the rest 
of my presents, but caught it up in both hands and 
ran to show it to the others. As I ran across from 
tht zala into the small drawing-room, I caught my 
foot on the step in the doorway and fell down, and 
my teacup was smashed to smithereens. 

Of course I set up a loud howl and pretended that 
I was much worse hurt than I really was. Mama 
came running to comfort me and said that it was 
my own fault because I had been careless. This 
made me very angry and I bellowed that it was not 
my fault but the fault of the beastly architect, who 
had gone and put a step in the doorway, and if it 
had not been for the step I should never have tumbled 
down. 

Papa overheard this and burst out laughing: 
"It 's the architect's fault, it 's the architect's fault!" 
and I felt angrier than ever and could not forgive 
him for laughing at me. 

The phrase "It 's the architect's fault" was thence- 
forth adopted as a saying in our family, and papa 
was fond of repeating it whenever any one tried to 
throw the blame for anything on anybody else. 

When I fell off my horse "because he stumbled" 
or "because the coachman had not strapped on the 
saddle-cloth tight enough,''' or when I did my lessons 
badly "because my tutor hadn't explained them 
properly," or when I was doing my military service 

58 




THE VILLAGE LIBRARY AND LIBRARIAN AT YASNAYA POLYANA 




THE STATION AT YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and had bouts of drinking and blamed army life for 
it — on these and all similar occasions my father used 
to say, "Of course, I know, it 's the architect's fault," 
and one always had to give in and confess oneself in 
the wrong. 

Papa had a number of such sayings taken from 
actual events. 

Another of them was : "For Prokhor's sake." I 
rather think he has himself told about the origin of 
this saying somewhere, probably in one of his letters. 

When I was a child I was taught to play the piano. 

I was very lazy and always played abominably; 
so long as I could strum out my hour's practice and 
get away, I was content. 

All of a sudden one day papa heard the most bril- 
liant runs and trills being executed in the zala and 
could not believe from the evidence of his ears that 
it was Ilyusha playing. 

When he came into the room and saw that it 
really was me playing, he also found Prokhor the 
carpenter busy at the window, putting in the winter 
frames.^ Then he understood why I was trying so 

3 Russian windows are constructed with an embrasure deep 
enough to allow of another window, the "winter frame," being put 
in, sash and glass complete, about a foot inside the ordinary 
window. The cracks are papered over to keep out draughts, and 
some moisture-absorbing substance stands in pots between the two 
frames to prevent the glass from getting foggy. Communication 
with the outer air is effected by means of the vasistas or practicable 
pane, corresponding in each frame, which opens like a little door. 

61 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

hard to do my best. I was playing "for Prokhor's 
sake." 

Many a time afterwards did this "Prokhor" fill a 
big part in my life; many a time did my father re- 
proach me with that phrase. 

There was a good phrase of my father's which he 
was fond of repeating, at first with good-natured 
irony, but latterly with a certain bitterness. That 
was "Anke Pie." 

My mother's parents had a friend called Dr. Anke, 
a Professor at the University, and he gave my grand- 
mother, Lyubov Alexandrovna Behrs, a recipe for a 
delicious name-day pie. When she married and 
came to Yasnaya Polyana, mama handed this recipe 
on to Nikolai the cook. 

Ever since I can remember, at all the ceremonial 
functions of our life, on the great feast days and on 
name-days, Anke Pie was always dished up for a 
sweet. Without this pie, the dinner would only 
have been half a dinner, and the festival no festival 
at all. A poor sort of name-day it would have been 
without a ring-cake sprinkled with almond-chips at 
breakfast and without Anke Pie for the even- 
ing meal! It would have been no better than 
Christmas without a Christmas tree, Easter with- 
out Easter eggs to roll,^ a nurse without a kokosh- 

4 Easter eggs are rolled by the children onto the floor down a 
little -wooden gutter or trough set slanting against the wall. There 
is some recondite magical significance in the ceremony. 

62 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

nik^^ or quass without raisins. Without that there 
would have been no sanctity about it. 

Every sort of family tradition — and my mother 
brought a large number into the house with her — 
was known to my father as "Anke Pie." 

When Nikolai the cook died, Dr. Anke's recipe 
was passed on to his son, Semyon, and I shall not be 
astonished on the 2oth of July, my name-day, if I 
go to Yasnaya Polyana, to find standing on the table, 
sprinkled with almond-chips, "short" and full of 
flavor, a ceremonial Anke Pie to welcome me. 

^ Kokoshnik. The crest or tiara of traditional Russian women's 
costume. V7et-nurses always wear the old-fashioned national 
costume. 



63 



CHAPTER V 

AUNT TANYA. UNCLE KOSTYA. THE DYAKOFS. 
PRINCE URUSOF. 

IN the summer almost every year the Kuzminskis 
used to stay with us at Yasnaya. Aunt Tanya 
Kuzminski my mother's sister is still our favor- 
ite aunt. At one time Uncle Sasha Kuzminski used 
to work at Tula and I can dimly remember how we 
used to go and visit him. After that he worked in 
various towns and his family used to come and visit 
us only in the summer. 

I cannot remember my eldest cousin Dasha, the 
one who died in the Caucasus, but we were very 
great friends with the other two, Masha and Vera, 
and they were almost like members of our own 
family. 

My aunt was very gay and full of life and to our 
childish imagination she seemed to be no less beauti- 
ful than mama. 

When I was still a child and had not yet read 
"War and Peace," I was told that Natasha Rostof 
was Aunt Tanya. When my father was asked 
whether that was true, and whether Dmitry Rostof 

64 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was such and such a person and Levin such and such 
another, he never gave a definite answer, and one 
could not but feel that he disliked such questions and 
was rather offended by them. He used to say that a 
writer forms his types from a whole series of people, 
and they never can or ought to be portraits of partic- 
ular individuals. And this of course is true. Aunt 
Tanya recalled the type of Natasha Rostof in many 
respects, but when I first read "War and Peace" I 
was struck by the idea that the other Tanya, my 
sixteen-year-old sister, was much more like Natasha 
than my aunt, whom I looked upon as a sort of 
mother, and I was astonished that my father should 
have written it when my sister Tanya was still quite 
a baby and that he should have divined her future 
character so accurately. 

Aunt Tanya was great friends not only with papa 
and mama but with all of us children. We used to 
go fishing with her in the Grumont and the Voronka, 
rode together, went mushroom-hunting together and 
were always more than delighted when she invited 
us to dine with her in "the other house." 

Of an evening when we were all gathered in the 
zala we used to get her to sing and honestly believed 
that no one in the whole world sang better than she 
did. Papa often used to play her accompaniments. 
I can still see him with his back bent over the key- 
board, all tense with the exertion, and our beautiful 

67 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

inspired Aunt Tanya standing by him with her eye- 
brows uplifted and a radiant expression in her eyes, 
and I can hear her pure, rather vibrating, and caress- 
ing voice. She sang Glinka's and Dargomyzhki's 
best ballads and I never heard any one sing "I remem- 
ber the wonderful moment" or "When in an hour of 
gaiety" better than she did. 

When my father married my mother, he was 
thirty- four, ^ and Aunt Tanya was still a girl, almost 
a child. Although as time passes the difference of 
years gets wiped out, one felt that papa always looked 
on Aunt Tanya semi-paternally as a sort of youngster, 
and she loved and respected him as an elder. The re- 
lations between them were therefore on a very sure 
and pleasant footing, and remained so till the end of 
his life. My father always responded to her out- 
bursts of unexpected plain speaking, provoked by 
little household unpleasantnesses, with jovial good- 
humor and playfulness, and would at last bring her 
round, so that she would first give a rather sulky 
smile, and then melt altogether, and join in his laugh. 

Unlike my mother. Aunt Tanya could understand 
a joke and answer back in the same vein. Later on, 
in the Chapter about the Letter-box,^ I shall repro- 
duce an extremely clever satire called "What Aunt 
Sonya likes and what Aunt Tanya likes." The 

1 His wife being only seventeen. 

2 Chapter XI. 

68 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

author of it is unidentified. Was it not Aunt Tanya 
herself who wrote it? 

Aunt Tanya was united to my mother not only by 
sisterly affection, but also by common interests. 
They were both devoted to their families and com- 
pletely absorbed in the bringing up of their children. 

When my mother and Aunt Tanya were both' 
nursing children at the same time, if ever it happened 
that one of them had to go away for a few hours, 
the other would take both children to her breast. 

I can remember Uncle Kostya Islavin from my 
earliest days. He was my mother's uncle and a 
friend of childhood of my father's. 

His father A. M. Islenyef's property "Krasnoye" 
was only sixteen miles from Yasnaya Polyana and 
the families of Tolstoy and Islenyef were old and tra- 
ditional friends. I can remember my great-grand- 
father Alexander Mikhailovitch as an old man of 
ninety when he visited us at Yasnaya and I can re- 
member how he rode out coursing with the grey- 
hounds with papa and Seryozha. He was a tre- 
mendous gambler and had lost the whole of his big 
property at cards. 

I did not learn till later that Uncle Kostya was 
not his legitimate son, and that all his life had been 
ruined by his having no fortune and no social po- 
sition. 

69 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Uncle Kostya always used to arrive quite unex- 
pectedly and he delighted in taking us all by surprise. 
We would come back from our walk one day and 
hear some one playing the piano very brilliantly in 
the zala. 

Papa at once guessed: "There 's Kostenka" and 
ran upstairs to greet him. When we got into the 
room the music had stopped and Uncle Kostya was 
standing on his head in a comer of the room. 

Or we would come into breakfast one morning and 
find Uncle Kostya sitting at the table reading the 
newspaper with an air of great solemnity. No one 
had noticed his arrival or could imagine how he had 
had time to have a bath and part his handsome blond 
beard so carefully. 

Uncle Kostya seemed to us to be the acme of ele- 
gance and fashion. No one could talk French so 
well as he could, no one could make such a beautiful 
bow or say the right word of greeting so aptly, or 
always be so uniformly agreeable. Even when he 
was finding fault with one of us about our manners 
the rebuke always came so mildly from his lips that 
it left nothing but a pleasant flavor. 

He used to come to us for Christmas or for any 
family festival and often stayed quite a long time. 

When our family moved into Moscow, Uncle 
Kostya helped mama to furnish the flat, gave her 
advice when she first went into the world of fashion 

70 




UNCLE KOSTYA ISLAVIN 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and was of great use to her in many ways. He was 
only too delighted to act as master of the ceremonies. 

He was always very fond of us children. He 
used to tell me that in my physique and character he 
saw a strain of both my grandfathers, on the Tolstoy 
and Islenyef sides. 

Uncle Kostya was a musician of remarkable talent. 
Nikolai Rubinstein,^ with whom he was at one time 
intimate, prophesied a brilliant musical career for 
him. But unfortunately, Uncle Kostya did not fol- 
low this line up and to the end of his days he re- 
mained an unsuccessful man, always solitary and in 
straitened circumstances. 

Papa got him a place on the editorial staff of the 
Moskovskiya V yedomosti through Katkof,^ and he 
r-emained there for a considerable time. Then he got 
a job as superintendent of the Sheremetyef Hosrpital 
and ended his days there about fifteen years ago. 

He left absolutely no property behind him. He 
even had hardly any shirts or linen. It appeared 
that everything he had he used to give away to the 
poor. And neither the acquaintances whom he met 
from day to day in fashionable drawing-rooms, al- 
ways beautifully dressed, nor his intimate friends, 
ever suspected that this handsome and kindly old 

3 This is not the famous Rubinstein, but his brother, who was 
head of the "Musical Society" in Moscow. 

* The well-known Panslavist editor, friend and adviser of Alex- 
ander III. 

73 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

gentleman had absolutely nothing in the world but 
what he carried on him, and that he had given every- 
thing else away to people as unfortunate as himself. 

Of all the visitors of the earliest period of our 
childhood we were fonder of the Dyakofs than of any 
one else : namely my godfather Dmitry Alexeyevitch, 
his grown-up daughter Masha, and her companion 
Sophie. They almost always came together and for 
many years were always present at all our Christmas 
trees. I can still remember the beautiful presents 
they used to bring us. 

Dmitry Alexeyevitch was, like Uncle Kostya, one 
of my father's oldest friends. We were astonished 
when papa used to tell us that he could remember 
him as a very slim young man. This was very hard 
to believe, because when we knew him, Dmitry 
Alexeyevitch was the stoutest man we knew. He 
had such a round elastic stomach that with one jerk 
of his abdominal muscles he could send a man flying 
across the room like an india-rubber ball. 

Whenever he arrived the whole house was ani- 
mated by his good-humored fun and became the 
gayest place imaginable. We all sat listening 
eagerly for his jokes, at which everybody was de- 
lighted ; we all used to roar with laughter when they 
came, papa louder than any one. Sometimes he sang 
Glinka duets with Aunt Tanya and this was really 

74 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

first rate. "What a wonderful fellow Dmitry is! 
How capitally he sings !" said my father. We were 
in ecstasy and begged him to sing his songs over and 
over again. 

Besides being great personal friends he and papa 
had another bond of union in the interest they both 
took in the management of their estates. The 
Dyakofs had a big and admirably organized property 
in the Novosilsk district, which Dmitry Alexeyevitch 
looked after like a model squire. 

In those remote days about which I am talking, my 
father was extremely interested in the management of 
his property and devoted a great deal of energy to it. 
I can remember his planting the huge apple-orchard 
at Yasnaya, besides several hundred acres of birch 
and pine forest, and at the beginning of the seventies, 
for a number of years, he was interested in buying 
land cheap in the province of Samara, and breeding 
droves of steppe horses and flocks of sheep. 

Dyakof never shared my father's philosophical and 
religious convictions, and the longer they lived, the 
greater and greater was the division of opinion be- 
tween them. I think the explanation of their con- 
tinued friendship was their having been friends as 
children. My father set great store by his old 
friends and entertained the warmest and most cordial 
affection for them. 

At this period of my life I can also remember 

75 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Prince Sergei Semyonovitch Urusof. He was a 
very odd and original man. He was almost a giant 
in stature. At the time of the Crimean War he was 
in command of a regiment and I am told he made 
himself remarkable by his extraordinary courage. 
He used to climb out of the trenches and walk up 
and down, dressed all in white, in a perfect rain of 
shells and bullets. 

The story was — I remember his telling it to me 
himself — that when the troops were going South, 
and a General who was reviewing his regiment 
abused one of the soldiers like a pickpocket for hav- 
ing lost a button off his uniform, Urusof called out 
to the soldier, "Fire at him !" The soldier fired at 
the General as he was told, but of course took good 
care not to hit him. 

Urusof was deprived of his command for this and 
was to have been dismissed from the army, but he 
was ultimately forgiven. 

During the siege of Sebastopol he proposed to the 
Allies to avoid bloodshed by deciding the dispute 
with a game of chess. He was a very good chess 
player and could easily give my father a knight and 
beat him. 

We children were rather afraid of him because he 
had the St. George's Cross ^ at his buttonhole, spoke 

^St. George's Cross, the Russian reward "for valour." (The 
allusion being to the English Victoria cross.) 

76 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in a deep bass voice, and was of such gigantic size. 
In spite of his inches he always wore enormous heels 
to make himself bigger and I remember his once 
scolding me for not wearing them too. "How can 
you make such a guy of yourself?" he said, pointing 
at my shoes. "A man's beauty lies in his stature, 
and every one ought to wear big heels." 

Somehow or other, by means of the higher mathe- 
matics, he used to calculate the length of every one's 
life, and he averred that he knew when my father 
and mother would die, but he kept the secret to him- 
self and told no one. 

He was strictly Orthodox by conviction. I do not 
know whether he had any influence on my father at 
the time when he set out on the search for a religion 
and began first by looking for it in the Orthodox 
church, but I think it quite probable that Urusof may 
have had something to do with it. 



77 



CHAPTER VI 

JOURNEY TO SAMARA 

I STILL have pretty clear, though rather frag- 
mentary and inconsequent recollections of our 
three summer excursions to the Steppes of 
Samara. 

My father had already been there before his mar- 
riage in 1862 and went there again afterwards by the 
advice of Dr. Zakharyin ^ who attended him. He 
took the koumiss-cure ^ in 1871 and 1872, and at last 
in 1873 ^^^ whole family went there. 

At that time my father had bought several hundred 
acres of cheap Bashkir lands in the district of Buzu- 
liik and we went to stay on our new property at a 
khutor or farm. 

I particularly remember our first expedition. We 
went by way of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod and 
thence down the Volga to Samara on a splendid 
steamer belonging to the "Caucasus & Mercury Com- 
pany." 

1 The same Dr. Zakharyin who attended Alexander III and was 
greatly blamed for telling him of his approaching death. 

^Koumiss Is fermented mare's milk, drunk by the Tartars as 
it was by the Scythians. Europeans go to the steppes to drink it 
as a cure for consumption and other wasting diseases. 

78 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

The captain of the steamer, who was very charm- 
ing and delightful, turned out to be a Sebastopol man, 
a comrade of my father's in the Crimean War. 

We touched at Kazan in the daytime. 

While the steamer was standing at the wharf we 
three, papa, Seryozha, and I, went for a walk in the 
outskirts of the town, near the wharf. 

My father wanted to have a look, however dis- 
tant, at the town where he had once been a Univer- 
sity student. ^^ We did not notice how the time 
passed in conversation, and we walked a considerable 
distance. 

When we got back we found that the steamer had 
gone quite a long time ago; the people there showed 
us a little receding speck in the distance on the river. 
My father ejaculated and groaned a great deal, and 
asked if there were not any other steamers going in 
the same direction ; but it appeared that all the steam- 
ers of other companies had already gone and we must 
stay in Kazan and wait till the next day. Then 
papa found that he had not any money on him. He 
began to groan again and of course I bellowed like a 
calf. For my mother and Aunt Tanya and all the 
party had gone off on the steamer and we were left 
alone. 

2a Tolstoy entered at Kazan University in 1843, when he was 
fifteen, and spent three years there. He took his degree in law 
at St. Petersburg University in 1848, three years before he joined 
the army. 

79. 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

A crowd of sympathetic people gathered round 
and tried to comfort me. 

Suddenly some one observed that the little spot, 
our steamer, on which we had our eyes fixed all the 
time, was beginning to get bigger and bigger instead 
of smaller and smaller, and it soon became evident 
that it had turned round and was coming towards us. 

A few minutes later it came alongside and took us 
on board and we continued our journey. 

Papa was quite upset by the obligingness of the 
Captain in coming back to fetch us at my mother's 
request; he wanted to pay for the extra wood that 
had been burned in the boilers and did not know how 
to thank him enough. Now that the steamer had 
come back for him, he groaned still louder than when 
it was going away, and was quite out of countenance. 

From Samara our party traveled eighty miles by 
road in a huge dormeuse with six horses and a postil- 
ion, and in several two-horse wicker-work chaises. 
My mother who was then nursing my little brother 
Peter — ^he died that autumn — rode in the dormeuse 
with the younger ones, Lyolya and Masha, while we 
others, I and Seryozha and Tanya, changed about, 
sometimes in papa's chaise, sometimes on the box of 
the dormeuse^ and sometimes in the two-seated dicky 
attached to the back of it. 

In Samara we lived on the farm, in a tumble-down 
wooden house, and beside us, in the steppe, were 

80 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

erected two felt kihitkas^ in which our Bashkir, 
Muhammed Shah Romanytch, lived with his wives. 
Morning and evening they used to tie the mares up 
outside the kihitkas^ where they were milked by 
veiled women, who then hid themselves within from 
the sight of men, behind a gaudy chintz curtain, and 
made the koumiss. 

The koumiss was bitter and very nasty; but my 
father and Styopa ^ were very fond of it and drank 
it in large quantities. 

They used to go into the kihitka and squat cross- 
legged on cushions ranged in a semi-circle on a 
Persian carpet. Muhammed Shah Romanytch 
would greet them with a smile of his toothless old 
mouth, and from behind the curtain an invisible 
woman's hand would push out a leather tursuk ^ full 
of koumiss. 

The Bashkir beat it up with a peculiar kind of 
stirrer, took a ladle of Carelian birch-wood, and be- 
gan solemnly to pour out the foaming white liquor 
into the cups. The cups were also of Carelian birch 
and all of different shapes and sizes. Some were 
broad and flat, others were narrow and deep. Papa 
would take the biggest cup between his hands 

^ Kibitkas, Tartar frame-tents, a name also applied to their trav- 
eling-wagons, similarly tilted. 

* Stephen Behrs, the Countess's brother. 

5 Tursuk, a triangular horse-leathex drinking pouch which the 
Bashkirs and Kirgizes carry at the saddle. 

83 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and drink it right off at one draught. Romanytch 
would fill it up again and again, and my father often 
drank eight cups or more at a sitting. 

"Why don't you drink too, Ilyusha^ Just see 
how delicious it is," he said to me, holding out a 
brimming cup. "Just drink it right off and you '11 
never stop asking for it." 

With a great effort over myself I drank a few sips, 
jumped up and rushed out of the kibitka to spit it 
out, so disgusting did it taste and smell to me. But 
papa and Styopa and even Seryozha drank it three 
times a day. 

At that time my father was very much interested 
in farming and especially in horse-breeding. Our 
kosydks or droves of mares ranged in the steppe, and 
a stallion went with every drove. The horses were 
very miscellaneous ; there were English hunters, stal- 
lions of the old-fashioned Rostoptchm breeds, trot- 
ters, Bashkirs, and argamdks^ 

Our stud afterwards increased to four hundred, but 
then came several bad years, many of the horses 
perished, and in the eighties the whole enterprise 
somehow melted away. 

But we still kept some of the horses which had been 
brought from Samara at Yasnaya Polyana. They 
were wonderfully good saddle-horses; we rode them 

® Long-limbed horses, originally of Circassian breed. 

84 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

for many a year, and their descendants are still living 
to this day. 

My father organized some horse-races that sum- 
mer. 

He had a ring of two miles measured out and 
marked with a plough-furrow and word was sent to 
all the Bashkirs and Kirgizes of the neighborhood 
that there were to be races and prizes. 

The prizes were a gun, a silk khalat '^ and a silver 
watch. 

In order to be exact, I must mention that we also 
had horse-races on our second visit to Samara in 
1875, ^^^ i^ is quite possible that I may have mixed 
them up and shall be telling here what really hap- 
pened the second time. But the confusion is unim- 
portant. 

A day or two before the appointed time the Bash- 
kirs began to come in with their kibitkas^ their wives, 
and their horses. Side by side with Muhammed 
Shah Romanytch's kibitka there rose a whole village 
of felt-covered kibitkas in the steppe, and beside each 
of them the Tartars made pickets for their horses and 
constructed earthen stoves to prepare their food in. 

The steppe was all alive. 

Women with veiled heads glided mysteriously to 

■^ Khalat, a Tartar word, from the Arabic, for the long gown 
worn by the Tartars; also used in Russian for an ordinary dressing- 
gown. 

85 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and fro among the kibitkas; portly and dignified 
Bashkirs were to be seen walking up and down ; and 
the horses training for the race whirled by in the 
open accompanied by the loud whooping of their 
riders. 

Two days were spent in feasting and preparing for 
the race. The Tartars drank an enormous quantity 
of koumiss and ate fifteen sheep and a horse, a lame 
English colt which had been fattened on pur- 
pose. 

In the evenings, when it grew cool after the sultri- 
ness of day, all the men in their curious many-colored 
khalats and embroidered skull-caps gathered together 
for bouts of wrestling and cock-fighting. 

My father was stronger than any of them and 
pulled all the Bashkirs over at cock-fighting on a 
stick.^ 

A certain Russian peasant-mayor who weighed 
about 22 stone, was the only man he could not pull 
over. He would pull with all his might and lift 
him half-way off the ground; it seemed as if in an- 
other moment he must have got the Mayor up on his 
legs, and we all waited with our hearts in our mouths ; 
when suddenly the Mayor would fling himself flop 
on the ground with all his weight and my father was 

^In this particular form of cock-fighting, the two combatants sit 
facing each other on the ground with their toes together, both 
holding on to a stick, and each endeavors to pull the other towards 
him and force him to rise on his feet. 

86 




PEASANT WOMEN OF THE YASNAYA POLYANA DISTRICT 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

pulled up on to his feet and stood before him smiling 
and shrugging his shoulders. 

One of the Bashkirs was very good at "playing on 
his throat," and my father was always making him 
perform. This is a very curious art. The performer 
lies down on his back and a little musical instrument 
seems to play in the depths of his throat, giving forth 
a clear, delicate note with a sort of metallic ring in 
it; one is puzzled to imagine how these melodious 
sounds can be produced, so sweet and so unexpected 
are they.^ 

There are very few who can "play on their throat," 
and even at that time it was said that the art was 
dying out among the Bashkirs. 

On the day of the races every one rode or drove to 
the course, the women in covered carriages and the 
men on horseback. 

A great many horses ran. The distance was i6J 
miles which they did in 39 minutes, and one of our 
horses got second prize. 

After the race we went to the Karalyk with my 
father on a visit to the Bashkirs and they gave us a 
dinner of mutton soup. Our host took pieces of 
mutton in his hands and distributed them to all the 
guests. When one of the Bashkirs who was among 
the visitors refused what was offered him, the host 
wiped his face all over with the greasy lump of mut- 

9 There is no apparatus used in this performance. 

89 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ton as if with a sponge, until the visitor gave in and 
ate it. 

After dinner we walked out into the steppe to look 
at the Bashkirs' droves. My father expressed great 
admiration for a certain light bay horse, and when 
we were preparing to go home we found the animal 
tied up to the shaft of our cart. My father was 
much perturbed, but to refuse the present would have 
been to offend our host, and we were obliged to accept 
it. My father had to make the Bashkir a consider- 
able present in gold-pieces afterwards. 

The Bashkir's name was Mikhail Ivanovitch. He 
came to see us several times and my father was fond 
of playing draughts with him. While he was play- 
ing Mikhail Ivanovitch used to keep murmuring 
"Have to think; very big think." But often, in 
spite of his "think," he got caught and my father 
would shut in his men and prevent him from moving, 
and we were all delighted and laughed like anything. 

We lived with our German tutor Fyodor Fyodor- 
ovitch in an empty bam in which rats squeaked and 
ran about at night. 

There were flocks of beautiful duddks or great bus- 
tards ^^ wandering in the steppe, often quite close to 
the house; and high up among the clouds sped by 
huge dark tawny eagles. ^^ 

10 Otis tarda. The great bustard does not fly, or very little. 
i^Aquila fulva. 

90 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

My father, Fyodor Fyodorovitch, and Styopa 
often tried to shoot the bustards, but they were very 
cautious birds and it was almost impossible to get 
within range. 

However, Fyodor Fyodorovitch once succeeded in 
creeping up unobserved towards one of them from 
behind a flock of sheep, and wounded it. When it 
was brought home alive, with some one holding its 
wings on either side, .papa and all of us rushed out to 
meet it, and this was such a momentous occasion that 
I still remember it quite clearly. 

Only a year ago Fyodor Fyodorovitch came to see 
me, old and broken down with paralysis, and we 
talked the event over again, and he remembered it 
just as well as I did. 

My father went away from the farm from time to 
time to buy horses at the markets in Buzuluk and 
Orenburg. 

I remember the first time when a drove of perfectly 
wild steppe horses was brought in and driven into 
the enclosure. 

When they went in to catch them with stick- 
lassos ^^ several of the horses dashed at the brick and 
earth wall, jumped over it, and galloped away into 
the steppe. Our Bashkir Lutai galloped after them, 
mounted on our best hunter, and came back driving 
them before him late at night. 

12 Sticks with running nooses on the end. 

91 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

This Bashkir could break in even the most restive 
savage. When the horse had been lassoed and 
bridled, two men would hold it by the bit and 
by the ears; the Bashkir would jump on its back, call 
out "Let go !" give it the reins and disappear in the 
steppe. A few hours afterwards he would return at 
a foot-pace with the horse all in a lather and as obedi- 
ent as if it had been ridden for years. 

Another time my father brought from Orenburg a 
splendid white Bokhara argamak and a pair of young 
donkeys which we took back afterwards to Yasnaya 
and on which we rode for many years. My father 
called them Bismarck and MacMahon. 

On our second expedition to Samara, in 1875, my 
father rode into Buzuliik to see some old Russian 
hermit who had lived there for twenty-five years in a 
cave. He had heard of him by report from the peas- 
ants of the neighborhood, who reverenced him as a 
saint. I begged my father to let me go with him, but 
he would not take me because my eyes were very bad 
at that time. I imagine that this hermit had nothing 
particularly interesting about him, as I do not remem- 
ber my father's having anything to tell us about him. 

The first year that we were on the farm there was 
a bad failure of the crops in the province of Samara, 
and I remember how my father rode about from vil- 
lage to village, went from house to house himself and 
made a register showing the condition of the peasants. 

92 




A VIEW IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

His first question at each house was whether the own- 
ers were Russians or Molokans/^ and he was partic- 
ularly interested in talking about religious questions 
with the dissenters. 

The peasant he was fondest of conversing with was 
a dignified and intelligent old man, Vasily Nikititch, 
who lived in Gavrilovka, the nearest village to us. 
Whenever he went to Gavrilovka my father stopped 
at his house and had a long talk with him. I cannot 
remember what they talked about, as I was quite 
small at that time and took no interest in famines or 
religious conversations. I can only remember that 
Vasily Nikititch kept repeating the word dvisti- 
telno^"^ "as a matter of fact," and that he gave us the 
most wonderfully clear white honey with our tea. 

13 Meaning by "Russian" Orthodox ; the Molokans being no less 
Russian than the rest. The Molokans are a rationalist sect allied 
to the Doukhobors, from whom they differ in declaring that all 
religion must be based on the text of the Old and New Testaments, 
while the Doukhobors maintain that "inward illumination" is the 
only guide. The name "Molokans" is a nickname given them by 
the Orthodox, because they drink milk {moloko) during Lent; their 
own name for themselves is "spiritual Christians." Stephen Grel- 
let, the Quaker, greatly preferred them to the Doukhobors and 
wrote a letter to Alexander I asking for special privileges for them. 

'^'^ Dmstitelno for deistmtelno, like the comic First Peasant in 
Tolstoy's comedy, "The Fruits of Enlightenment." 



95 



CHAPTER VII 

games; my father's jokes; books; lessons 

EVER since I can remember, we children were 
divided into two groups, the "big ones" and 
the "little ones." ' 

The big ones were Seryozha, Tanya, and myself. 
The little ones were my brother Lyolya (Lyof ) and 
my sister "little" Masha who was so called to dis- 
tinguish her from her cousin "big" Masha Kuzminski. 
We elder ones always kept ourselves apart and never 
admitted the little ones into our company, because 
they understand nothing and only interrupted our 
games. It was on account of the little ones that we 
had to get home earlier than we needed ; the little ones 
might catch cold ; it was on account of the little ones 
that we were not allowed to make a noise, because 
they slept in the daytime ; and if one of the little ones 
cried about anything we had done and went and com- 
plained to mama, it was always the big ones' fault 
and it was we who got scolded and punished. 

The one I was most united with both by age and 

1 The names "big ones" and "little ones" were expressed in Eng- 
lish in the Tolstoy household, just like the epithets of "big" and 
"little" Masha. 

96 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

by character was my sister Tanya. She was a year 
and a half older than I was ; black-eyed, lively and in- 
ventive. It was always jolly with her and we under- 
stood one another with half a word. I and she knew 
things which nobody but ourselves could understand. 

We were very fond of running round the dining- 
table in the zala. I would hit her on the shoulder 
and run away at full speed. 

"I hit you last ! I hit you last !" 

She would come after me, catch me a slap and run 
away again. 

"I hit you last ! I hit you last !" 

Once I caught her up and was just raising my hand 
to hit her, when she suddenly stopped and faced 
round on me, hopping up and down, waving her 
hands in front of her and saying: "This is an owl, 
this is an owl I" 

Of course I understood at once that if "this" was 
"an owl" it was out of the question to touch her; and 
from that time it became the regular rule that when 
any one said "this is an owl," they could not be 
touched. 

Seryozha would never have understood this. He 
would have begun asking a lot of questions and argu- 
ing about why one should not touch an owl, and 
would have come to the conclusion that there was no 
point in it; but I saw at once that this was a very 
sensible arrangement, and Tanya knew that I should 

97 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

understand her and that was her reason for saying 
ito 

My father was the only person who properly un- 
derstood me and Tanya, and that not always. 

He had some excellent inventions of his own and 
taught us quite a lot. 

For instance, there was his "Numidian Cavalry." 

We would all be sitting, perhaps in the zala^ rather 
flat and quiet after the departure of some dull vis- 
itors. Up would jump my father from his chair, 
lifting one hand in the air, and run at full speed 
round the table at a hopping gallop. We all flew 
after him, hopping and waving our hands like he did. 
We would run round the room several times and sit 
down again panting in our chairs in quite a different 
frame of mind, gay and lively. The Numidian Cav- 
alry had an excellent effect many and many a time. 
After that exercise all sorts of quarrels and wrongs 
were forgotten and tears dried with marvelous rapid- 
ity. 

Excellent also were some humorous verses which 
my father recited to us when we were children. I do 
not know where he got them from, I only remember 
that they gave us extraordinary delight. They ran 
like this : 

Die angenehme Winterzeit 

Is ferry nice indeet! 

Beiweilen wird's ein wenig kalt; 

98 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Doch Himmel, stamp your feet! 

Auch wenn Man doch nach Hause kommt 

Da steht der Punch bereit: 

1st es nicht ferry nice indeet 

An der kalten Winterzeit? 

Another poem which also had to be said in broken 
German was to this effect : 

Doctor, Doctor Hupfenzeller, 
Haf some pity on a feller : 
First I mustn't eat all day, 
Denn he take my pipe away: 
Whoa! whoa! whoaaa! 

These lines were trotted out at various junctures of 
life and had an excellent effect when for no particular 
reason one of us had "left his eyes out in the rain." 

The games of early childhood are pretty much the 
same all over the world, playing at horses, at soldiers, 
dolls, and hide and seek: ^ As we got bigger we began 
to invent our own games and they often turned out 
very interesting. 

Once we had all been deep in a translation of some 
stupid novel in which the chief part was played by a 
Mr. Ulverston. I have completely forgotten the plot 
of the novel; I only remember that Mr. Ulverston 
was the hero and fell in love with somebody and said : 
"I am lonely and bored." We cut out all the char- 
acters of this novel in paper and lay on the floor in 
the zala and made our figures walk and talk and act 

99 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

out the whole of the story. The best of all at recit- 
ing the parts was our chief inventive genius Tanya. 

Papa found us one day playing this game and took 
a pair of scissors and cut us out a man who was en- 
tirely pink. He cut him out of a plate in a French 
fashion paper, and the whole figure was taken from 
the bare decollete of a highly-colored lady, so that he 
was completely flesh-colored all over. There was no 
such character in the novel. However, papa told 
us that this was Adolphe, and we at once invented a 
part for him, and ever afterwards he was our favorite 
hero. We could no longer imagine the novel having 
any point without Adolphe. 

At this period of our childhood we began to be 
wrapped up in Jules Verne. Papa brought the books 
from Moscow, and every evening he read aloud to us 
from "The Children of Captain Grant," "Twenty 
Thousand Leagues under the Sea," "From the Earth 
to the Moon and Round It," "Three Russians and 
Three Englishmen," and last of all "Around the 
World in Eighty Days." 

There were no illustrations to this last story, so 
papa illustrated it himself. Every day he prepared 
appropriate drawings in pen and ink for the evening, 
and they were so interesting that they gave us far 
more pleasure than the pictures in all the rest of the 
books. 

I can clearly remember one of his drawings repre- 
loo 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

seating some fantastic and terrible Buddhist goddess 
or other with several heads adorned with snakes. 
My father could not draw a bit, nevertheless the re- 
sults were delightful and we were all tremendously 
pleased. We awaited the evening impatiently, and 
all crawled across the top of the round table in a 
bunch, when he got to the place that he had illus- 
trated and broke off reading to pull out his picture 
from under the book. 

After Jules Verne — this was in Monsieur Nief's 
days — we had Dumas' "Three Musketeers" read to 
us, and papa himself struck out the passages which 
were not fit for children to hear. We were greatly 
interested in these censured pages in which the love 
affairs of the principal characters were narrated ; and 
we were very anxious to read them in secret but never 
summoned up courage. 

• ••••••. 

I have already mentioned our beloved English 
nurse Hannah above. After her came the red- 
cheeked youthful Dora; then Emily Carrie; and the 
last English woman went when my youngest brothers, 
Andrei and Mikhail, grew put of childhood. 

When we boys began to get big, we had tutors; 
the first of these was a German, Fyodor Fyodorovitch 
Kaufmann, who stayed for two or three years. I 
cannot say that we were particularly fond of him. 
He was rather rough, and even we children were 

lOl 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

struck by his essentially German stupidity. His re- 
deeming feature was that he was a devoted sports- 
man. Every morning he used to jerk the blankets 
off us and shout "Auf, Kinder! auf !" and during 
the daytime plagued us with German calligraphy. 
He had thick dark hair which he wore very smooth 
Once I woke up at night and, still half-asleep, saw 
Fyodor Fyodorovitch sitting in front of the glass 
with a head as naked as a pumpkin, shaving himself. 
I was very frightened, and he ordered me angrily 
to turn over on the other side and go to sleep. 

In the morning I did not know whether it was a 
dream I had seen, or whether it was real. It ap- 
peared that Fyodor Fyodorovitch wore a wig, and 
took pains to conceal it. 

After Fyodor Fyodorovitch we had a Switzer, 
Monsieur Rey, as tutor for several years, and it was 
after him that we had Monsieur Nief, a French Com- 
munard, the man who brought a squirrel and a viper 
to the kitchen to fry. In Russian, Monsieur Rey 
and Monsieur Nief were called simply Mr. Gray 
(Pose-rey-f) and Mr. Blue (Posi-nief). These 
nicknames were very suitable, for the former was 
always dressed in gray and the latter in blue. 

When the Amnesty was proclaimed in France, 
Monsieur Nief departed for Algeria; and it was only 
then we learnt that his real name was le Comte de 
Montels. 

102 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

In the winter, when we skated on the big pond, 
he used to walk up and down on the bank in a short 
fur jacket, frozen to death, rubbing his hands to- 
gether and saying, "Oh que les Russes sont f rileux !" 
Why, because he felt the cold so much himself, he 
should accuse the Russians of it, we could never 
make out. 

Speaking of Monsieur Nief, I should like to tell 
of one amusing incident, very characteristic of him. 
Once when we were sitting at tea in the evening, 
papa was looking through the Moskovskiya Vyedo- 
mosti which had just arrived by post. It contained 
news of an attempt on the life of the Emperor Alex- 
ander II. As Monsieur Nief was sitting with us, 
papa translated the article from Russian into French 
as he read. 

When he came to the place where the paper said, 
"But the Lord did not suffer his Anointed One to 
perish," papa, having read "Mais le bon Dieu n'a 
pas perdu son, son . . ." hesitated, evidently 
searching for the French word for "Anointed 
One." 

"Son sang froid?" suggested Monsieur Nief, per- 
fectly seriously. We all roared with laughter, and 
there the newspaper reading ended. 

Besides the people mentioned, my sisters almost 
always had French governesses; we boys also had 
Russian tutors, and in addition, once a week our 

105 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

music master, A. G. Mitchurin, came over from Tula: 
so that all our time was spent at lessons, which were 
portioned out as in schools, and we passed from one 
teacher to another. 

My mother and father also gave us lessons. 

I have already described how papa taught me 
arithmetic when I was quite a child. Later, when 
I was about thirteen I think, he began to give me 
Greek lessons. I remember his beginning to learn 
Greek himself, I remember the zeal and perseverance 
with which he set to work ; he got on so well that after 
six weeks he could read Herodotus and Xenophon at 
sight. It was also on Xenophon that he started us. 
He explained the alphabet to me, and then set me 
on to the Anabasis at once. At first it was very hard. 
I sat with glassy eyes, and often was on the point of 
howling; but in the end I saw that I had got to go 
through with it, and I did. 

I was taught Latin in the same way. 

When I went up for the entrance examination at 
Polivanofs Classical Gymnase in 1881, I surprised 
all the masters because, though completely ignorant 
of grammar, I could read the classics at sight far bet- 
ter than was required of me. In this I see a proof 
that my father's original system of teaching was the 
right one. 

It was just in the same way that later on he learnt 
Hebrew, and he got to know it so well that he could 

106 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

make out all the passages he wanted in the Old Testa- 
ment, and often gave original interpretations of his 
own of several passages to his teacher, Rabbi Minor. 



107 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE chief passion of my childhood was 
riding. I well remember the time my father 
wrote about in the letter given at the begin- 
ning of these Reminiscences, when he used to put 
me in the saddle in front of him and we rode out to 
bathe in the Voronka. 

I remember how I was shaken up when he trotted, 
and how afraid I was of losing my balance all the 
time. I remember how my hat used to fall off in the 
forest, and Seryozha or Styopa used to get off his 
horse and pick it up; and above all I remember the 
smell of the horse when I approached it and the foot- 
man, Sergei Petrovitch, took me by the leg and 
jumped me up into the saddle. I grasped the 
friendly withers and held on with all my might with 
both hands. 

When we arrived at the bathing-place, we used to 
tie the horses up to birch-trees and run down the plat- 
form. Papa and Styopa used to dive head-first 
straight into the open river; while we boys used to 
splash about in the waters of the bathing-place look- 

108 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ing at the little fish and lively long-legged spiders 
that ran along the top of the water and somehow 
never got drowned. Papa taught us to swim, and 
when we could swim out into the river we bragged a 
good deal about it, and felt that it showed great 
courage. 

Our first riding-horses were Spoonbill (Kolpik) 
and Kashirski/ Fyodor Fyodorovitch used to call 
them der Kolpinka and der Kassachirski. I went for 
my first ride alone on the gray Spoonbill, and from 
that time forth I was able to ride without help. 

Papa sometimes took us out riding with him ; and 
then we used to go quite a long way. 

I shall never forget how he tormented me one day. 
Hearing that he was going for a ride, I begged him 
to take me with him, until at last he consented. He 
was riding a sturdy English mare, and they mounted 
me on a Samara bay, with nothing but a saddle-cloth ; 
no saddle or stirrups. It was the same horse which 
took the second prize at the races. He was an easy 
horse to ride, but he had a very sharp and bony back- 
bone. 

So off we started. 

As soon as we got into the flat, papa set off at a 
brisk trot, and I went jogging after him. We rode 
on and on until we were more than three miles from 
home. I was so tired I could hardly stand it, and 

^That is, from the district of Kashira in Tula ProvincCo 

109 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

still he went on. Every now and then he would look 
back and ask, "You 're not tired ^" and of course I 
said no: and on we went again» 

We rode all round the Crown Wood, and across 
the Grumont by various foot-paths and hollows ; and 
when I got home at last I could hardly crawl off my 
horse, nnd for three days afterwards I was a regular 
cripple and every one called me John Gilpin. John 
Gilpin is the hero of a very amusing English poem. 
His horse ran away with him and he could not stop 
it, and galloped a tremendous distance and had vari- 
ous adventures. When they took him off his horse 
he was quite bandy-legged. We were very fond of 
the pictures in the book, of which I remember one 
representing John Gilpin galloping with his wig fly- 
ing off; and another where he is getting off his horse 
with his bald head bare and his knees turned out.^ 

I have several interesting recollections connected 
with these rides to the bathing-place. 

First of all the story about the "Green Stick." 
On the right hand side of "Bathing-place Road," at 
the top of a gully, near a small glade, there is a 
place remarkable for its strange artificial top-soil. 
The earth is covered with a layer of fine black slag, 
evidently the remains of some ancient iron-works. 

In this place, a narrow footpath runs among the 

2 Evidently Randolph Caldecott's edition. 

no 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

oak trees parallel with the road, with twisted bare 
roots of trees crossing it. As my horse went over 
these roots, he used to prick up his ears, and lift up 
his legs in a peculiar way, and I would tuck in my 
knees so as not to knock them against the trees. 

It was here, according to my father, that his 
brother Nikolenka had buried a mysterious green 
stick, with which he connected a childish legend of 
his own. "If any one of the Ant-brothers ^ finds this 
stick," he used to say, "he will enjoy great happi- 
ness, and make all mankind happy by the power of 
love." As we rode past the place, my father was 
fond of telling us this story, and I remember once 
asking him what the stick was like, and thinking I 
would go out with a spade and look for it. At that 
time of course my father had no idea that one day 
he would be buried on that very spot. 

Here is another reminiscence. One day as we 
were going to bathe, papa turned round and said to 
me: "Do you know, Ilyusha, I am very pleased 
with myself to-day. I have been bothered with her 
for three whole days, and could not manage to make 
her go into the house ; try as I would, it was impos- 
sible. It never would come right. 

3 This supposititious Totemistic order has been shown by Tolstoy 
himself to have arisen from a childish and natural confusion be- 
tween "Moravian" Brothers and muravelny, adjective, "of ants." 
Tolstoy's own eirenistic philosophy was largely derived from the 
teaching of Peter of Chelczic, the founder of the Moravian Brothers. 

Ill 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"But to-day I remembered that there is a mirror 
in every hall, and that every lady wears a bonnet. 

"As soon as I remembered that, she went where I 
wanted her to, and did everything she had to. 

"You would think a bonnet is a small affair but 
everything depended on that bonnet." 

As I recall this conversation I feel sure that my 
father was talking about that scene in "Anna 
Karenina," where Anna goes secretly to see her son 
Seryozha, after her separation from Karenin. 

Although there is nothing about a bonnet or a mir- 
ror in this scene, in the final form of the novel — noth- 
ing is mentioned but a thick black veil — still I im- 
agine that in its original form, when he was working 
on the passage, my father may have brought Anna 
up to the mirror, and made her straighten her bon- 
net, or take it off. 

I can remember the interest with which my father 
told me this, and it seems strange to me now that he 
should have talked about such subtle artistic experi- 
ences to a boy of seven who was hardly capable of 
understanding him at the time. However that was 
often the case with him. 

I once heard him give a very interesting definition 
of the qualities a writer needs for his work : 

"You cannot imagine how important one's mood 
is," he said. "Sometimes you get up in the morning, 
fresh and vigorous, with your head clear, and you 

112 






#■ 



^^^.^Ik^. 



"i 



AT YASNAYA POLYANA, FEBRUARY, 1908 




THE POND AT YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

begin to write. Everything is sensible and consist- 
ent. You read it over next day and have to throw 
the whole thing away, because, good as it is, it misses 
the main thing. There is no imagination in it, no 
subtlety, none of the necessary 'something,' none of 
that 'only just' without which all your cleverness is 
worth nothing. Another day you get up after a 
bad night, with your nerves all on edge, and you 
think, well, to-day I shall write well at any rate! 
And as a matter of fact, what you write is beautiful, 
picturesque, with any amount of imagination. You 
look it through again ; it is no good, because it is writ- 
ten stupidly. There is plenty of color but not 
enough intelligence. 

"One's writing is good only when the intelligence 
and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as 
one of them overbalances the other, it 's all up; you 
may as well throw it away and begin afresh." 

And as a matter of fact there was no end to the re- 
writing in my father's works. His industry in this 
particular was truly marvelous. 

Besides riding and sport, we were extremely fond 
of skating and croquet. 

As soon as the pond froze over, we used to put on 
our skates and spend all the time we had out of les- 
sons on the ice. 

At the beginning of the winter when the ice was 
not yet firm we were not allowed to skate on the "Big 

115 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Pond," and had to go to the "Lower Pond" which 
was smaller, and, what was more important, shal- 
lower. 

Papa told us the following story about the Lower 
Pond. When he was a child a boy called Volodenka 
Ogaryof came on a visit to Yasnaya. He was a con- 
ceited creature full of self-importance and contempt 
for everything that was not himself. When the 
Tolstoy children took him round to show him the 
park he walked up to the Lower Pond and said con- 
temptuously: "What is this?" 

"A pond." 

"A pond? This? It's a puddle. I'll jump 
over it as soon as look at it !" 

The children egged him on, "Go on, jump away!" 

Volodenka took a run down the knoll and jumped. 
Of course he jumped right into the middle of it and 
would probably have been drowned if some women 
who were there haymaking had not pulled him out 
with their rakes. After this Volodenka drew in his 
horns a little. 

I once played a very dirty trick on this pond for 
which I paid dearly afterwards. We had gone down 
to skate, and some five or six village boys of my own 
age came and joined us. The ice was still thin and 
kept giving long metallic reports when you set foot 
on it. I thought I should like to see how strong it 
was, so I collected all the boys into one spot, and 

116 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

told them at the word One, two, three ! to jump with 
all their might. I myself drew off to one side. 

The boys gave a jump, the ice broke under them 
and they all went to the bottom in a heap. Fortu- 
nately it was in a shallow place, near the tail of the 
pond, and no great harm came of it. The children 
were brought into the house and dried and given hot 
tea to drink, and I was severely punished. 

There was a wooden tobogganing hill on the big 
pond, and all the winter there used to be paths swept 
on it. My father and mother skated with us and 
added great animation to our games. 

Our liveliest skater was my brother Seryozha. 
The ice on the pond was swept, as it were, in main 
streets, and side streets; and Seryozha used to run 
away from us through this maze, while I and Tanya 
tried to catch him. Once at a crossing Seryozha 
somehow failed to dodge out of the way and we all 
three collided at the top of our speed and fell, 
Seryozha underneath and we two on the top. When 
we got up we saw Seryozha, all blue in the face, lying 
on the ice, and wriggling his legs. He was picked up 
and taken home at once. 

He walked firmly, carrying his own skates, but he 
remembered nothing and understood nothing. He 
was asked, "What day is it to-day'?" "I do not 
know." He even forgot that it was Sunday and we 
had had no lessons. They sent at once to Tula for 

117 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

a doctor, and put leeches behind his ears, and by the 
evening he was none the worse for it. 

Another time my brother Lyolya, who was eight 
years old, seeing a big breathing-hole covered with a 
thin layer of fresh ice, skated right across it. Fortu- 
nately the ice did not break until the further end, 
where he could catch hold of the edge with his hands. 
Some women who were rinsing out linen at another 
breathing-hole saw that he was drowning, and fished 
him out. 

He was carried home at once in his wet fur jacket, 
and rubbed with spirits of wine, and endless Ah's 
and Oh's were uttered over him. He had had a nar- 
row escape, for it was a very deep place where he 
went in. 



118 



CHAPTER IX 

SPORT 

WE were always devoted to sport from our 
earliest childhood. 
I can remember my father's favorite 
dog in those days, an Irish setter called Dora, as well 
as I can remember myself. 

I can remember how they brought round the cart 
with a very quiet horse between the shafts and we 
drove out to the marsh, to Degatna or to Malakhovo. 
My father and sometimes my mother or a coachman 
sat on the seat, while I and Dora lay on the floor. 

When we got to the marsh, my father used to get 
out, stand his gun butt-down on the ground, and 
hold it with his left hand to load it. First he 
poured powder into both barrels, then put in felt 
wads and rammed them down with his ram-rod. 
The ram-rod struck on the wad and bounced up again 
with a sort of metallic noise. My father v/ent on 
ramming until it jumped right out of the mouth. 
Then he poured in the shot and wadded that down 
too. Dora meanwhile fidgeted about, whining im- 
patiently and wagging her thick tail in big sweeps. 

119 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

While my father splashed through the marsh, we 
drove round the bank rather behind him and eagerly 
followed the ranging of the dog, the getting up of the 
snipe, and the shooting. 

My father sometimes shot pretty well, though he 
often lost his head, and missed frantically. 

In the spring we delighted in going with him to 
shoot the woodcocks as they flew over.^ We often 
stood in the Timber Reserve ^ near the "Green Stick," 
but our favorite place was the bee-run beyond the 
Voronka. Once upon a time our bees were kept 
there and our one-eyed bee-keeper Semyon used 
to live there in a low-roofed, smoke-blackened 
hut. 

My father was very fond of shooting woodcocks 
when they flew over in the autumn migration, and a 

1 Andreyevsky's Encyclopaedia devotes an article to this sport. 
It begins immediately after the arrival of the v^oodcocks in the 
Spring and is stopped by law, for the preservation of the species, 
at the end of May (June 12, new style). The birds fly low over 
the woods in the evening, soon after sunset, in different directions, 
converging ultimately on a general rendezvous, where the cocks 
compete, with various exhibitions of grace, agility, and music, for 
the favor of the hens. They utter peculiar cries as they fly, dis- 
tinguished, onomatopoeical ly, by the Russians, as "tsikking" or 
wheepling and ''horklng," a kind of grunting or quacking. The 
cocks scuffle and fight in the air on their way to the rendezvous. At 
nightfall they pair and lie quiet: the woodcock is a polygamous 
bird. In spite of their low flight, the sport is a difficult one, as 
it is always carried on in twilight or semi-darkness. 

2 This Timber Reserve begins about 600 yards from the house 
at Yasnaya Polyana, and marches with the Crown Wood. The 
Moscow-Kursk Railway runs about two miles from the house. 

120 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

sort of rivalry grew up between him and our German 
tutor, Fyodor Fyodorovitch. 

Fyodor Fyodorovitch usually went ^^zum Eisen- 
hahn^'' to the place where the railway cuts through 
the Crown Wood. But my father's favorite place 
was beyond the Voronka. 

At dinner-time both would return boasting of their 
bag and relating their experiences. 

When Fyodor Fyodorovitch killed less than my 
father he used to say the reason was that my father 
had a dog and he had not. 

Once the contrary proved true. My father de- 
cided not to go shooting that day, and lent Dora to 
Fyodor Fyodorovitch. When Fyodor Fyodorovitch 
had started, my father could not hold out any longer 
but took a gun and went off to the wood without say- 
ing a word to any one. Both came back at dinner- 
time and my father brought in a brace m'ore than 
Fyodor Fyodorovitch. According to him, if you 
have no dog the woodcocks fly nearer and it is far 
easier to hit them. So Fyodor Fyodorovitch lost his 
halo, and we were delighted. 

There was a short period of two or three years 
when I used to go out shooting with my father, as a 
boy. He had a blue Belton called Bulka, at that 
time, and I used to take out a very intelligent and 
independent-minded Courland pointer, called "Little 



'un." 



121 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

When my father gave up shooting "Little 'un" 
always used to go for walks with him, and my father 
was very fond of him and never went out without 
him. He used to tell us how "Little 'un" came into 
his study and invited him to come out walking. At 
the usual walking time the door of the study would 
open, and "Little 'un" would come quietly in. If he 
saw that my father was sitting working at his table, 
he would look shyly out of the corners of his eyes, and 
creep about with inaudible footsteps, lifting up his 
claws and walking on his pads. When my father 
looked at him, he would answer with an impercept- 
ible movement of the tail and lie down under the 
table. 

"As if he knew that I was busy and must not be 
interrupted," said my father, amazed at his tact. 



But our favorite sport was coursing with grey- 
hounds. What a pleasure it was when the footman 
Sergei Petrovitch came in and woke us up very, very 
early, before dawn, with a candle in his hand ! We 
jumped up full of energy and happiness, trembling 
all over in the morning cold; threw on our clothes 
as quickly as we could, and ran out into the zala^ 
where the samovar was boiling, and papa was wait- 
ing for us. 

Sometimes mama came in in her dressing-gown, 
122 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and made us put on all sorts of extra woolen stock- 
ings and sweaters and gloves. 

"What are you going to wear, Lyovotchka?" she 
would say to papa. "It 's very cold to-day and there 
is a wind. Only the Kuzmmski ^ overcoat again to- 
day^ You must put on something underneath, if 
only for my sake !" 

Papa would make a face, but give in at last, and 
put on his short gray overcoat under the other and 
sally forth. It was beginning to get light. Our 
horses were brought round, we got on, and rode first 
to the "other house," or to the kennels, to get the 
dogs. Agafya Mikhailovna would be anxiously 
awaiting us on the steps. In spite of the coldness of 
the morning, she was bare-headed and lightly clad, 
with her black jacket open, showing her withered, 
dirty old bosom, all dusted with snuff. She carried 
the dog-collars in her lean, knotted hands. 

"Have you gone and fed them again?" asked my 
father severely, looking at the dogs' bulging stom- 
achs. 

' Ted them ? Not a bit ; only j us t a crust of bread 
apiece." 

"Then what are they licking their chops for?" 

"There was a bit of yesterday's oatmeal over." 

"I thought as much ! All the hares will get away 

3 The Kuzminski overcoat; that is, an overcoat which Tolstoy 
had bought at some time from "Uncle Sasha." 

125 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

again. It really is too bad! Do you do it to spite 
me?" 

"You can't have the dogs running all day on 
empty stomachs, Lyof Nikolayevitch," she grunted, 
going angrily to put on the dogs' collars, 

"This is for Winger, this is for Sultan, this is for 
Darling." 

In the corner, under a blanket, lay the smoke- 
colored Tuman (Fog) and when she came to him he 
used to wag his tail and growl. 

When I stroked his short silky coat, he would 
stiffen himself all over and growl in an affectionate, 
humorous sort of way. 

"Tumashka, Tumashka." 

"R-r-r . . . R-r-r . . . R-r-r . . ." 

"Tumashka, Tumashka!" 



"R-r-r . . . R-r-r-r . . ." 

Like a cat purring. 

At last the dogs were ready, some of them on 
leashes, others running free; and we rode out at a 
brisk trot past Bitter Wells and the Grove into the 
open country. 

My father gave the word of command, "Line out !" 
and indicated the direction we w^ere to go in, and we 
spread out over the stubble-fields and meadows, 
whistling and winding about along the lee side of the 
steep baulks,^ beating all the bushes with our hunting- 

*The mezhas or "baulks" are the banks dividing the fields of 

126 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

crops and gazing keenly at every spot or mark on the 
earth. 

Something white appeared ahead. You would 
stare hard at it, gather up your reins, examine the 
leash, and could hardly believe your good luck in 
having come on a hare at last. You rode up closer 
and closer, with your eyes gummed on the white 
thing, and it turned out not to be a hare at all, but a 
horse's skull. Confound the thing ! 

You looked at papa and Seryozha. "I wonder if 
they saw that I mistook that skull for a hare"?" 
Papa sat keen and alert on his English saddle with 
the wooden stirrups,^ smoking a cigarette, while 
Seryozha had got his leash entangled and could n't 
get it straight. 

"Thank heaven, nobody saw me, or what a fool I 
should have felt." So we rode on. 

The horse's even pace began to rock you to sleep 
at last ; you would be feeling rather bored at nothing 
getting up, when all of a sudden, just at the moment 
you least expected it, right in front of you, twenty 
paces away, up jumped a gray hare as if from the 
bowels of the earth. 

The dogs had seen it before you, and started 
forward, and were in full pursuit already. You 
would begin to bawl "Tally Ho ! Tally Ho !" like a 

different owners or crops. Hedges are not used for this purpose 
in Russia. 

5 That is, with wooden foot rests, instead of metal, for warmth. 

127 



- REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

madman, flog your horse with all your might and fly 
after them. 

The dogs had come up with the hare ; they turned 
it; they turned it again: the young and fiery Sultan 
and Darling ran over it, caught up again and ran over 
it again; and at last the old and experienced Winger, 
who had been galloping on one side all the time, 
seized her opportunity and sprang in ; the hare gave a 
helpless cry, and the dogs, burying their fangs in it, 
in a star-shaped group, began to tug in different di- 
rections. 

"Let go! Let go!" 

We came galloping up, finished off the hare and 
gave the dogs the "tracks," ^ tearing them off toe by 
toe and throwing them to our favorites, who caught 
them in the air ; and papa taught us how to strap the 
hare on the back of the saddle. 

We rode on. 

After the run we would all be in more cheerful 
spirits, and get to better places near Yasenki and 
Retinka. Gray hares got up more often ; each of us 
had his spoils in the saddle-straps by now, and we 
began to hope for a fox. 

Not many foxes turned up. If they did, it was 
generally Tumashka, who was middle-aged and fas- 
tidious, who distinguished himself. He was sick of 

^ Pdzanki, tracks of a hare, name given to the last joint of the 
hind leg. 

1128 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

hares and made no great effort to run after them. 
But when there was a fox in the case he would gallop 
at full speed, and it was almost always he who killed. 

It was late, and often dark when we got back 
home. 

We unstrapped the hares from the saddles and laid 
them out on the floor in the entrance-hall. 

Mama would come down the stairs with the little 
ones, and grumble at us for staining the floor again ; 
but papa was on our side and we did not care two- 
pence about the floor. 

What did a few stains matter, when we had run 
down eight gray hares and a fox'? And were n't we 
tired ! 

One day papa quarreled with Styopa "' out hunt- 
ing. 

This was near Yagpdnoye, about fourteen miles 
from home. 

Styopa was riding through a thin birch-wood. A 
gray hare jumped under his feet; Styopa let his dogs 
go, and we ran her down. My father came gallop- 
ing up, and began to abuse Styopa for running a hare 
in the wood. 

"If you go on like that, you '11 smash all the dogs 
to pieces against the trees ; how can you do such an 
idiotic thing'?" 

Styopa answered back; they both lost their tem- 

■^ Stephen Behrs, the Countess's brother. 

129 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

pers and each said some nasty things; and Styopa, 
greatly offended, handed over his dogs to Seryozha 
and started to ride home in silence. We spread out 
over the field and rode off in the opposite direction. 

Suddenly we saw a gray hare get up right under 
Styopa's feet. He started and put spurs to his horse, 
cried "Tally-ho!" and was on the point of galloping 
after it, but evidently remembering that he had quar- 
reled with "Lyovotchka," reined in his horse, a 
hunter called Frou-Frou, and without looking round 
silently rode away at a foot pace. 

The hare turned round in our direction, we let the 
dogs go and ran it down. When the hare was 
strapped up, papa remembered about Styopa and was 
sorry for having been unkind to him. 

"Ah! how horrible it is! how beastly!" he said, 
looking at the dot disappearing over the landscape. 
"We must catch him up. Seryozha, ride after him 
and tell him that I beg him not to be angry but to 
come back; and tell him we ran the hare down!" he 
shouted after him, when Seryozha, delighted for 
Styopa' s sake, had put spurs to his horse and was 
already galloping after him. 

Styopa soon came back and the coursing went on 
gaily till the evening, without further misadventures. 

Still more interesting was the coursing over the 
new snow. 

130 




A HUNGER GROUP 




PORTHOUSE MENTIONED IN ANNA KARENINA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

The excitement began over-night. Would the 
weather settled Would the snow stop in the night *? 
or would there be a blizzard? 

Early in the morning we ran out half-dressed into 
the zala and examined the horizon. If the line of 
the horizon was clearly defined, that meant that the 
weather was settled and we could go, but if the hori- 
zon melted into the sky, that meant the snow was 
drifting in the open and the tracks made at night were 
covered over. We waited for papa or sometimes 
summoned courage to send to wake him, and at last 
we were all ready and started out. 

This sort of hunting is particularly interesting, be- 
cause by the tracks of the hare, you can trace out the 
whole of his nocturnal life. You can see his 
track where he got up hungry in the evening and 
started out in search of food. You can see how he 
tore the snow-covered herbage, pulled down tufts of 
wormwood, sat down and played, and at last, when 
he had had his fill of eating and running about, 
turned resolutely to find a form for the day. 

This is where his cunning begins. He doubles, 
covers his tracks, doubles again, or even makes a 
double double, and covers his tracks again; and at 
last, convinced that he has sufficiently confused and 
hidden his tracks, he digs himself a hole under the 
warm lee-side of a baulk and lies down. 

When you come on his track you have to raise your 

131 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

hand with the hunting-crop in it and give a long mys- 
terious whistle. Then the rest of the hunters ride 
up, papa rides forward along the track to disentangle 
it, and holding our breath with excitement, we creep 
on behind him. 

Once we ran down twelve gray hares and two foxes 
in the new snow in a single day. 

I do not remember exactly when my father gave up 
hunting; I think it was in the middle of the eighties, 
at the same time as he became a vegetarian. In 
October of 1884 he writes to my mother from Yas- 
naya Poly ana: "Went for a ride, the dogs close on 
my heels. Agafya Mikhailovna said they would 
attack the cattle if they were not on a leash, and sent 
Vaska with me. I wanted to see what had become of 
my hunting-instinct. After forty years, it is very 
pleasant to ride out and search for game. But when 
a hare jumped up, I merely wished him God-speed. 
The main thing is, one is ashamed." 

But even later than that, the passion for sport was 
not extinct in him. When he was out walking in the 
spring and heard the wheeple and "hork" of the 
woodcock, he would break off his conversation, lift up 
his head, seize his comrade excitedly by the arm, and 
say: "Listen, listen, there's a woodcock! Do you 
hear?' 

In the nineties, when he was staying at my house 
in the Tchornski District,^ establishing kitchens for 

8 Also in the Province of Tula. 

132 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

the starving, a rather touching thing happened. He 
was fond of riding through the villages on my Kirgiz 
hunter, and my greyhound, Don, which was used to 
the horse and always went out with it, often followed 
him. Once when he was riding in the open he heard 
some village children near him calling out "A hare, a 
hare!" 

"I looked up," he told me, "and saw a gray hare 
running towards the forest. It was a long way off, 
and it was quite out of the question to run it down. 
But I wanted to see how Don could run. The temp- 
tation was too strong for me, and I showed him the 
hare. Don set off, and imagine my horror when he 
began to catch him up. I offered up a prayer: 
'Escape, for Heaven's sake, escape I' I looked again 
and saw Don turn him again and again. What was 
I to do ^ Fortunately it was quite close to the edge 
of the forest. The hare dashed into the undergrowth 
and got away. But if Don had caught him ... I 
should have been in despair." 

Not wishing to make my father miserable I forbore 
from telling him that Don did not get home until an 
hour after he did, and then covered with blood and 
distended like a barrel. It was evident that he had 
caught the hare in the undergrowth and eaten him 
there. But thank Heaven my father never knew 
about it. That was the one secret which I managed 
to keep from him all my life. 

133 



CHAPTER X 



"anna karenina" 



I CAN just remember that terrible event, the 
suicide of one of our neighbors, which my 
father made use of afterwards in describing 
the death of Anna Karenina. This was in January, 
1872. 

Bibikof, father of the half-witted Nikolenka, who 
used to come to our Christmas trees, had a house- 
keeper named Anna Stepanovna. Out of jealousy 
for the governess she went to Yasenki station, threw 
herself under the train and was crushed to death. I 
remember some one arriving at Yasnaya, and telling 
my father about it ; I remember that he started off for 
Bibikof s and Yasenki at once, and was present at the 
post-mortem. 

I think I can even recall Anna Stepanovna's face 
a little ; I remember it as round and kind and foolish. 
I was fond of her for her good-natured, affectionate 
ways, and was very sorry when I heard of her death. 
I could not understand how Alexander Bibikof could 
give up such a charming woman for another. 

I remember my father writing his Alphabet and 

134 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Reading-book in 1871 and 1872: but I cannot at all 
remember his beginning "Anna Karenina." I prob- 
ably knew nothing about it at the time. What did it 
matter to a boy of seven what his father was writing? 
It was only later, when one kept hearing the name 
again and again, and bundles of proofs kept arriving 
and being sent off almost every day, that I understood 
that "Anna Karenina" was the name of the novel on 
which my father and mother were both at work. My 
mother's work seemed much harder than my father's, 
because we actually saw her at it, and she worked 
much longer hours than he did. She used to sit in 
the small drawing-room off the zala^ at her little 
writing-table, and spend all her free time writing. 
Leaning over the manuscript and trying to decipher 
my father's scrawl with her short-sighted eyes, she 
used to spend whole evenings at work, and often sat 
up late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. 
Sometimes, when anything was written quite illeg- 
ibly, she would go to my father's study and ask him 
what it meant. But this was very rare because my 
mother did not like to disturb him. When it hap- 
pened, my father would take the manuscript in his 
hand, ask with some annoyance: "What on earth 
is the difficulty*?" and begin to read it out loud. 
When he came to the difficult place he would 
mumble and hesitate, and sometimes had the greatest 
difficulty in making out, or rather in guessing, what 

137 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

he had written. He had a very bad handwriting and 
a terrible habit of inserting whole sentences between 
the lines, or in the corners of the page, or sometimes 
right across it. My mother often discovered gross 
grammatical errors, and pointed them out to my 
father and corrected them. 

When "Anna Karenina" began to come out in the 
Russki Vyestnik^^ long galley-proofs were posted 
to my father and he looked them through and cor- 
rected them. At first, the margins would be marked 
with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, 
marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual 
words would be changed, and then whole sentences; 
erasures and additions began; till, in the end, the 
proof sheet was reduced to a mass of patches, 
perfectly black in places, and it was quite impos- 
sible to send it back as it stood, because no one but 
my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of 
conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures. 

My mother would sit up all night copying the 
whole thing out afresh. 

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, 
neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine 
clear handwriting, and everything was ready so that 
when "Lyovotchka" came down he could send the 
proof-sheets off by post. 

1 A Moscow monthly, founded by Katkof, who somehow man- 
aged to edit at the same time both this and the daily Moskovskiya 
Fyedomosti, on which "Uncle Kostya" worked. ' 

138 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

My father would carry them off to his study to 
have "just one last look," and by the evening it was 
just as bad again; the whole thing had been re- 
written and messed up once more. 

"Sonya m)^ dear, I am very sorry, but I 've spoilt 
all your work again; I promise I won't do it any 
more," he would say, showing her the passages he 
had inked over with a guilty air. "We '11 send them 
off to-morrow without fail." But this to-morrow 
was often put off day by day for weeks or months 
together. 

"There's just one bit I want to look through 
again," my father would say, but he would get car- 
ried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh. 
There were even occasions when, after posting the 
proofs, my father remembered some particular words 
next day and corrected them by telegraph. 

Several times, in consequence of these re-writings, 
the printing of the novel in the Russki Vyestnik was 
interrupted, and sometimes it did not come out for 
months together. 

When my father was at work on the eighth and 
last part of ^'Anna Karenina", the Russo-Turkish 
War was in progress. It was heralded by the ex- 
traordinarily beautiful comet of 1876 and a long 
series of extraordinarily beautiful Aurorse Boreales, 
which we spent the whole winter admiring. There 
was something elemental and menacing in this fiery 

139 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

nocturnal glow and in the luster of the splendid trail- 
ing star. 

During the war, papa and all the household, we 
children included, were greatly interested. When 
the newspapers arrived from Tula, one of the grown- 
ups used to read them aloud, and the whole 
household collected to listen. We knew all the gen- 
erals not only by name and patronymic but also by 
face, for their portraits were to be seen on all the 
calendars, on cheap broad-sides and even on our 
chocolates. 

The Dyakofs gave us a perfect army of toy 
Turkish and Russian soldiers for Christmas, and we 
spent whole days together playing at war with them. 

At last we heard that a party of Turkish prisoners 
had been brought into Tula and we drove over with 
papa to look at them. I remember how we went into 
a big courtyard, surrounded by a stone wall and saw 
a number of stalwart, good-looking men in red f ezzes 
and loose blue breeches. 

Papa walked boldly up to them and entered into 
conversation. Some of them talked Russian and 
asked for cigarettes. He gave them cigarettes and 
money. Then he began to question them about their 
mode of life. He made great friends with them, 
and made two of the biggest wrestle holding each 
other by the belt. Then one of the Turks wrestled 
with a Russian soldier. 

140 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"What good-looking, agreeable, gentle creatures !" 
said my father as we went away; but it seemed odd 
to me, that he should be so friendly with those ter- 
rible Turks whom we were bound to hate and to fight 
because they massacred Bulgarians and waged war 
against our troops. 

In the last part of "Anna Karenina" my father, in 
describing the end of Vronski's career, showed his 
disapproval of the Volunteer movement and the 
Panslavonic Committees, and this led to a quarrel 
with Katkof . I can remember how angry my father 
was when Katkof refused to print those chapters as 
they stood and asked him either to leave out part 
of them or to soften them down, and finally returned 
the manuscript, and printed a short note in his 
paper to say that after the death of the heroine the 
novel was, strictly speaking, at an end; but that 
the author had added an epilogue of two printed 
sheets, in which he related such and such facts, and 
that he would very likely "develop those chapters 
for the separate edition of his novel." In conse- 
quence of this, a rupture ensued between my father 
and Katkof and they never became friends again. 

In connection with Katkof I remember, among other 
things, a very interesting saying of my father's. He 
said that, as a rule, people who are masters of lit- 
erary form are no good at talking, and per contra^ 
eloquent people are entirely incapable of writing. 

143 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

As an example of the first category, he adduced 
Katkof, who according to him mumbled and stam- 
mered in conversation and could not put two words 
together; ^ and in the second category he numbered 
many well-known speakers, T. N. Plevako^ among 
them. 

In concluding this chapter, I wish to say a few 
words about my father's own opinion of "Anna 
Karenina." 

In 1875 h^ wrote to N. N. Strakhof : "I must 
confess, that I was delighted by the success of the last 
piece of 'Anna Karenina.' I had by no means ex- 
pected it, and to tell you the truth I was amazed, 
that people should be pleased by such ordinary and 
empty stuff." 

The same year he wrote to Fet : "It is two months 
since I have defiled my hands with ink or my heart 
with thoughts. But now I am setting to work again 
on my tedious^ vulgar 'Anna Karenina,' with only 
one wish, to clear it out of the way as soon as pos- 
sible and give myself leisure for other occupations; 
not schoolmastering, however, which I am fond of, 
but wish to give up; it takes up too much time." 

In 1878, when the novel was nearing its end, he 
wrote again to Strakhof: "I am frightened by the 

2 Katkof had on this account been a failure as a professor in 
Moscow University in his young days. 

3 A Moscow barrister, famous for the half -Irish and half -Oriental 
eloquence of his speeches. 

144 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

feeling that I am getting into my summer mood 
again. I loathe what I have written. The proof 
sheets for the April number, "of 'Anna Karenina' in 
the Russki Vyestnik,'' now lie on my table, and I 
really have not the heart to correct them. Every- 
thing in them is beastly and the whole thing ought to 
be rewritten — all that has been printed too — scrapped 
and melted down, thrown away, renounced ; I ought 
to say: 'I am sorry, I won't do it any more'; and 
try and write something fresh instead of all this in- 
coherent, neither-fish-nor-flesh-nor-fowlish stuff." 

That was how my father felt towards his novel 
while he was writing it. Afterwards I often heard 
him say much harsher things about it. 

"What difficulty is there in writing about how an 
officer fell in love with a married woman?" he used 
to say. "There 's no difficulty in it and above all no 
good in it." 

I am quite convinced, that, if my father could have 
done so, he would long ago have destroyed this 
novel which he never liked, and which he always 
wanted to disown. 



145 



CHAPTER XI 

THE LETTER-BOX 

IN the summer when both families were together 
at Yasnaya, our own and the Kuzminskis, 
when the house and the annex were both full 
of people, the family and guests, we used to establish 
our Letter-box. It originated long before, when I 
was still quite small and had only just learnt to write, 
and it continued with intervals till the middle of the 
eighties. The box hung on the landing at the top of 
the stairs, beside the grandfather clock; and every one 
dropped his compositions into it, the verses, articles, 
or stories, that he had written on topical subjects in 
the course of the week. 

On Sundays, we all used to collect in the zala at 
the round table; the box was solemnly opened, and 
one of the grown-ups, often my father himself, used 
to read the contents aloud. 

All the papers were unsigned, and it was a point 
of honor not to peep at the handwriting; but, in spite 
of this, we almost always guessed the author pretty 
correctly, either by the style, or by his self -conscious- 
ness, or else by the strained indifference of his expres- 

146 




-^ 



z' ' 



/ 



A.. 



, . ' , ^jf'f^ 



:^^v ■ ^ -^- ~~ 



'A<^y y-'' y.// '' 



^'■r 



■^/' 



'^-^V/- ■^:.^./v 









«- 



FACSIMILE OF A TOLSTOY MANUSCRIPT 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

sion. When I was a boy, and for the first time wrote 
a set of French verses for the Letter-box, I was so 
shy at having them read out, that I hid under the 
table, and sat there the rest of the evening until I was 
pulled out by force. For a long time after, I wrote 
no more and was always fonder of hearing other 
people's compositions read than my own. 

All the "events" of our life at Yasnaya Folyana 
found their echo one way or another in the Letter-box 
and no one was spared, not even the grown-ups. All 
our secrets, all our love affairs, all the incidents of 
our complicated life, were revealed in the Letter- 
box and both the family and the visitors were good- 
humoredly made fun of. 

Unfortunately much of the correspondence has 
been lost by now, but parts of it are preserved by some 
of us in copies or by memory. I cannot remember all 
the interesting things that there were in it; but here 
are a few of the best, from the period of the eighties. 
• ••••••• 

The old fogey continues his questions. Why, when a 
woman or an old man enters the room, does every well- 
bred person not only offer them a seat, but give them up his 
own? 

Why do they insist on making Ushakof or a Servian Offi- 
cer who comes to pay a call stay to tea or dinner? 

Why is it considered wrong to let an older person or a 
woman help you on with your overcoat and so on? And 
why are all these charming rules considered obligatory 

147 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

towards others, when ordinary people come every day, and 
we not only do not ask them to sit down, or to stop to din- 
ner, or to spend the night, or render them any service, but 
would look on it as the height of impropriety? 

Where do those people end to whom we are under these 
obligations ? 

By what characteristics are the one sort distinguished 
from the others ? 

And are not all these rules of politeness bad, if they do 
not extend to all sorts of people? And is not what we 
call politeness an illusion and a very ugly illusion? 

Lyof Tolstoy.^ 

Question: Which is the most "beastly plague," a cattle- 
plague case for a farmer, or the ablative case for a school- 

^ * Lyof Tolstoy. 

Answers are requested to the following questions: 

Why do Ustyiisha, Masha, Alyona, Peter, etc., have to 

bake, boil, sweep, empty slops, wait at table . . . while 

the gentry have only to eat, gobble, quarrel, make slops and 

eat again? t ^t^ 

° Lyof Tolstoy. 

My Aunt Tanya, when she was in a bad temper 
because the coffee had been spilt, or because she 
had been beaten at croquet, was in the habit of send- 
ing every one to the devil. My father wrote the fol- 
lowing story ''Susoitchik" about it. 

1 Tolstoy's signature is added here only for clearness. His con- 
tributions were of course unsigned like every one else's. They are 
preserved in the Historical Museum in Moscow. 

148 




TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER, ALEXANDRA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

The devil, not the chief devil, but one of the rank and 
file, the one charged with the management of social affairs, 
Susoitchik by name, was greatly perturbed on the 6th of 
August, 1884. From the early morning onwards, people 
kept arriving who had been sent him by Tatyana Kuzmin- 
ski. 

The first to arrive was Alexander Mikhailovitch Kuz- 
minski ; ^ the second was Misha Islavin ; the third was 
Vyatcheslaf ; the fourth was Seryozha Tolstoy, and last of 
all came old Lyof Tolstoy, senior, accompanied by Prince 
Urusof. The first visitor, Alexander Mikhailovitch, caused 
Susoitchik no surprise, for he often paid Susoitchik visits in 
obedience to the behests of his wife. "What, has your wife 
sent you again?" "Yes," replied the Presiding Judge of 
the District Court shyly, not knowing what explanation he 
could give of the cause of his visit. 

"You come here very often. What do you want?" 

"Oh, nothing in particular; she just sent her compli- 
ments," murmured Alexander Mikhailovitch, departing 
from the exact truth with some effort. 

"Very good, very good; you are always welcome; she is 
one of my best workers." 

Before Susoitchik had time to show the Judge out, in 
came all the children, laughing and jostling and hiding one 
behind the other. 

"What brought you here, youngsters? Did my little 
Tanyetchka send you ? That 's right ; no harm in coming. 
Give my compliments to Tanya, and tell her that I am 
always at her service. Come whenever you like: old 
Susoitchik may be of use to you." 

2 "Uncle Sasha," her husband. 



151' 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

No sooner had the young folk made their bow, than old 
Lyof Tolstoy appeared with Prince Urusof. 

"Aha ! So it 's the old boy ! Many thanks to Tanyet- 
chka. It 's a long time since I have seen you, old chap ! 
Well and hearty? And what can I do for you?" 

Lyof Tolstoy shuffled about, rather abashed. 

Prince Urusof, mindful of the etiquette of diplomatic 
receptions, stepped forward and explained Tolstoy's appear- 
ance by his wish to make acquaintance with Tatyana 
Andreyevna's oldest and most faithful friend. 

"Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis." 

"Ha, ha, ha, quite so !" said Susoitchik. *T must reward 
her for to-day's work. Be so kind. Prince, as to deliver 
the marks of my good-will to her." 

And he handed over the insignia of an order in a morocco 
case. The insignia consisted of a necklace of imps' tails 
to be worn about the throat, and two toads, one to be worn 
on the bosom and the other on the bustle. 

Lyof Tolstoy. 

the ideals of yasnaya polyana ^ 
Lyof Nikoldyevitch i. Poverty, peace, and concord. 

(Tolstoy) 2. To burn everything he wor- 

shiped, to worship everything 
he burnt. 

Sofya Audrey evna l. Seneca. 

(his wife) 2. To have 150 babies who will 

never grow up. 

Tatyana Audrey evna 1. Perpetual youth. 

(Aunt Tanya) 2. The emancipation of women. 

3 From internal evidence, one may guess that this Is also by the 
author of "What Aunt Sonya Likes and What Aunt Tanya Likes." 

152 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 



Ifyd'' 



'Big'' Maska^ 



Mme. Seuron • 
Vera Kuzminski 
Prince Urusof 

All the children 



Tanya Tolstoy 



Carefully to conceal that he has a 
heart and to look as if he had 
killed a hundred wolves. 

A communal family, founded on 
the principles of grace and wa- 
tered with the tears of sensi- 
bility. 

Elegance. 

Uncle Lalya.'' 

A long-headed game at croquet and 
to forget all else terrestrial. 

To stuff themselves all day with 
all manner of scraps, and from 
time to time, for the sake of va- 
riety, to yell their heads off. 

A close-cropped head. Spiritual 
refinement and new shoes every 
day. 



LySlya (Lyof Tolstoy, To be editor of the Novosti.^ 
junior) 

*The author of these "Reminiscences." 

5 Masha Kuzminski. 

6 A French lady who acted as governess, and wrote some enter- 
taining Memoirs of her life with the Tolstoys. 

7 Uncle Lalya, i. e., Count Tolstoy. Lalya and Lyolya both stand 
for Lyof (Leo). 

8 Count Lyof Tolstoy the younger did as a matter of fact take 
to writing; among other things he wrote "The Chopin Prelude," an 
answer to his father's "Kreutzer Sonata." 

153 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Princess Obolenski Universal happiness and family- 

life all round. 

"Little" Masha The sound of guitar-strings, 

Triphonovna Their marriage. 

TO AUNT TANYA 

When the sun was shining daily- 
Then every one lived gaily 
And like a marriage-bell. 

But it somehow struck Tatyana 
That at Yasnaya Polyana 
One cannot always dwell. 

And it took but small discerning 
That the children need some learning 
If they're to get on well. 

And the girls must have some training 
And a deal of hard explaining 
To become like Mademoiselle. 

So they got a lot of books 
And in spite of grievous looks 
Lessons went along. 

But when it came to Genesis, 

In spite of all their menaces, 

Everything went wrong. 



154 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Masha sat with visage scowling, 
Little Vera started howling: 
"No more work for me!" 

And one day when they were readin' 
Of the driving out from Eden, 
Vera up and thus spake she : 

"In the Bible we are telled 
"How that Adam was expelled 
"And Eve was sent away. 

"Don't you teach such stuff to me, 
"For it 's plain as plain can be 
"Que ce rCest pas vrai. 

"Why, O why, should we be tortured 
"And not let into the orchard 
"The apple-trees to shake? 

"For it was n't so in Eden ; 
"You could get at things to feed on| 
"No one locked the gate. 

"Why did they punish Adam? 
"It was you who told us, madam; 
"For curiositel 

"And his punishment was such 
"Just because he knew too much; 
"I will not sin that way!'* 



^55 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Now their mother 's fairly graveled 
How the knot can be unraveled; 
And I don't wonder! 

Lyof Tolstoy. 

aunt sonya and aunt tanya ; and generally speaking, 
what aunt sonya likes and what aunt tanya 

LIKES ^ 

Aunt Sonya likes making underlinen, and doing broderie 
anglais e and all sorts of beautiful work. Aunt Tanya likes 
making frocks, and telling fortunes. Aunt Sonya likes 
flowers, and in the early spring is seized with a passion for 
gardening. She puts on a troubled look, digs in the beds, 
consults with the gardener and astonishes Aunt Tanya by 
knowing the Latin names for all the flowers, until Aunt 
Tanya says to herself, "What a dungeon of learning she 
is!" 

Aunt Tanya says that she cannot stand flowers, and that 
it is not worth while bothering yourself with such garbage ; 
but secretly she delights in them. 

Aunt Sonya bathes in a gray costume and goes sedately 
down the steps into the water, gasping with the cold; then 
makes a graceful dive and swims right away with smooth 
even strokes. 

Aunt Tanya puts on a torn American-cloth cap with 
pink chintz ribbons under the chin; goes with a desperate 
plump into the depths, and at once turns over motionless 
on her back. 

Aunt Sonya is afraid when the children jump into the 
water. 

9 Attributed by the author of this book, in an earlier chapter, to 
"Aunt Tanya." 

156 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Aunt Tanya calls the children cowards if they are afraid 
to jump. 

Aunt Sonya puts on her spectacles, collects the children, 
and walks with a resolute step into the plantation, saying, 
"Mind you keep close to me, my little dears," and likes to 
walk slowly about the forest and pick birch-mushrooms,^^ 
not despising even gripe-agarics,^^ and says, "Don't forget, 
to pick the gripe-agarics, children ; your father is very fond 
of them salted, and they will all be eaten by spring." 

Aunt Tanya, when she is going for a walk in the forest, 
is dreadfully afraid that somebody will prevent her, or come 
dogging her heels; and when the children turn up she says 
severely, "Well, run along, but for Heaven's sake keep 
out of my sight; and if you get lost don't howl." She 
dashes quickly round all the woods and down all the hol- 
lows, and likes picking aspen toadstools.^^ She always 
carries ginger nuts in her pocket. 

In difficult junctures Aunt Sonya always says to herself, 
"Who needs me most? To whom can I be most useful?" 

Aunt Tanya says to herself, "Who can be most useful 
to me? Whom can I send anywhere?" 

Aunt Sonya washes in cold water. Aunt Tanya is afraid 
of cold water. 

Aunt Sonya likes reading philosophy and holding learned 
conversations ; she enjoys taking Aunt Tanya's breath 
away with terrible long words, and completely succeeds in 
her ambition. 

10 Boletus viscidus. 

11 Agaricus torminosus. A mushroom capable of causing some 
discomfort as the name implies; but rendered innocuous by the 
pickling process. A common food with the peasants, but not among 
the gentry. 

12 Boletus aurantiacus, or luridus, a large and highly-colored 
tungus which grows in woods in the late summer. 

157 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Aunt Tanya likes reading novels and talking about love. 

Aunt Sonya cannot stand pouring out tea. 

Nor can Aunt Tanya. 

Aunt Sonya cannot stand toadies and religious maniacs. 

Aunt Tanya is very fond of both ! 

Aunt Sonya, when she plays croquet, always finds some 
other occupation to fill up her spare moments, such as 
scattering sand on the stony places or mending the mal- 
lets, and says that she is too active to sit doing nothing. 

Aunt Tanya follows the game with furious concentra- 
tion, hating her opponents and forgetful of everything else. 

Aunt Sonya is short-sighted and does not see the cob- 
webs in the corners and the dust on the furniture. Aunt 
Tanya sees them and has them swept away.. 

Aunt Sonya adores children. Aunt Tanya is far from 
adoring them. 

When the children fall down and bump themselves 
against the floor, Aunt Sonya caresses them, and says, 
"Never mind, my pet! never mind, my darling child! 
We'll bump this horrid floor. Take that! Take that!" 
And the child and Aunt Sonya both bump the floor furi- 
ously. 

Aunt Tanya, when the children bump themselves, rubs 
the place savagely, and says, "Confound you, you brat, and 
the mother that bore you ! Where the devil are the nurses, 
confound them all*? And why don't you bring me some 
cold water instead of all standing there like stuck pigs?" 

When the children are ill. Aunt Sonya consults medical 
works with a gloomy air and gives them opium. When 
the children are ill, Aunt Tanya scolds them and gives 
them castor oil. 

Aunt Sonya likes dressing herself up every now and then 

158 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in something out of the way, and taking everybody by sur- 
prise, when she goes in to dinner in the zala on Sundays. 
Aunt Tanya also likes putting on fine clothes, but likes 
something that makes her look younger. 

Aunt Sonya sometimes likes doing her hair a la injured 
innocence, and then assumes the aspect of a woman perse- 
cuted by fate and man, and yet so gentle and innocent 
withal, with her pigtail down her back and her hair combed 
smooth in front, that you say to yourself, "Merciful 
Heaven, who is the rascal that could injure her? and how 
could that angel endure it ?" and tears of compassion spring 
to the eyes at the very thought. 

Aunt Tanya likes doing her hair high, with the nape of 
the neck uncovered, and locks hanging low on the fore- 
head; she imagines that her eyes look bigger that way and 
she blinks them continually. 

Aunt Tanya always likes to have the last word in a 
quarrel. 

Aunt Sonya, after a quarrel, likes to start talking again 
as if nothing had happened. 

Aunt Sonya never eats anything at breakfast and if she 
does once in a way boil herself a couple of eggs, she gives 
them up to any one who wants them. Aunt Tanya when 
she gets up says to herself: "What would my Lady 
fancy?" 

Aunt Sonya eats quickly, in small mouthfuls, like a hen 
pecking, with her head bent low over her plate. Aunt 
Tanya stuffs her mouth full, and if any one looks at her 
while she is eating, tries to look as if she only ate because 
she was obliged to, and not because it gave her any pleas- 
ure. 

Aunt Sonya likes sitting at the piano, and playing and 

159 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

singing to the children in a gentle voice, "Gop, gop, gop! 
break into a gallop !" while the children lark about. 

Aunt Tanya cannot stand mixing up children and music, 
but has no objection to her own children dancing too when 
Aunt Sonya plays, only she conceals the fact. 

Aunt Sonya makes clothes for her children with enough 
turned up to allow for another fifteen years' growth. 

Aunt Tanya leaves no margin, and the first time they go 
to the wash, they have to be re-made. 

Aunt Sonya likes evening parties — Aunt Tanya cannot 
stand them. 

Aunt Sonya is always feeling anxious about somebody, 
especially when they have gone away on a journey. Aunt 
Tanya, once she has said good-by, tries to forget them and 
bothers her head no more. 

Aunt Sonya when she is enjoying any pleasure or fes- 
tivity immediately mingles a feeling of melancholy with 
her enjoyment. Aunt Tanya gives herself up to the pleas- 
ure of the moment. 

Aunt Sonya is very delicate about other people's property, 
so that when Aunt Tanya has mushroom-pie she says, "Are 
you sure I am not robbing you, Tanya dear?" (when it is 
a matter of somebody else's property Aunt Sonya always 
says "you" instead of "thee" and "thou") and so saying, 
takes an end. Aunt Tanya despairingly and persuasively 
begs her to take the middle, but in vain: the petition is 
rejected. 

When Aunt Tanya does not get new bread for breakfast 
she asks Aunt Sonya, "Have n't you any new bread to-day ?" 
and without waiting for an answer, picks up the bread and 
smells it, then smells the butter; and finally pushes them 
both to one side, and cries, "The bread is always stale! 

160 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

The butter always smells of the cow!" and nevertheless 
goes on eating other people's bread and other people's but- 
ter. 

The question which on the whole has the best of it, Aunt 
Tanya or Aunt Sonya, is not yet solved. 

We often had visits at Yasnaya from a crazy sort 
of religious maniac of the name of Blokhm. He suf- 
fered from megalomania, founded on the claim that 
he had "passed through all the ranks of nobility" 
and was equal to the Emperor Alexander II and to 
God. Consequently he lived exclusively to ''have 
a good time", kept an "open money bank" and 
called himself a Prince and "Knight of all the 
Orders." When he was asked why he had no money 
and begged for alms, he used to smile naively, and 
answer, unabashed, that there had been some diffi- 
culty about remittance, but that he had "sent in a 
report" and would get it in a few days. With 
Blokhin who is described in the following "Asylum 
Bulletin" under number 21, my father compares 
many of the other patients at Yasnaya Polyana, all 
of whom he reckoned as dangerous and requiring 
treatment; but Blokhin himself he compares with 
Sasha, a little girl still at the breast, and he con- 
siders him the only one who can be certified as 
cured, because he is the only one who reasons really 
consistently. 



161 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

BULLETIN OF THE PATIENTS AT YASNAYA POLYANA 
LUNATIC ASYLUM 

No. 1. (Lyof Nikolayevitch Tolstoy.) ^^ Sanguine com- 
plexion. One of the harmless sort. The patient is sub- 
ject to the mania known to German lunatic doctors as 
Weltverbesserungswahn. The patient's hallucination con- 
sists in thinking that you can change other people's lives by 
words. General symptoms: discontent with all the existing 
order of things ; condemnation of every one except himself, 
and irritable garrulity quite irrespective of his audience; 
frequent transitions from fury and irritability to an un- 
natural tearful sentimentality. Special symptoms: busying 
himself with unsuitable occupations, such as cleaning and 
making boots, mowing hay, etc. Treatment: complete in- 
difference of all surrounding the patient to what he says; 
occupations designed to use up all his energy. 

No. 2. (The Countess Sofya Andreyevna.) Belongs 
also to the harmless sort, but has to be shut up at times. 
The patient is subject to the mania petulanta hurry upica 
maxima. The patient's hallucination consists in thinking 
that every one demands everything of her and that she 
cannot manage to get everything done. Symptoms : solu- 
tion of problems which are not proposed; answering ques- 
tions before they have been put; repelling accusations 
which have not been made ; and satisfaction of demands 
which have not been put forward. The patient suffers 
from the Blokhm-bank mania. Treatment: hard work. 
Diet: segregation from frivolous worldly people. A good 

13 The names of the patients have been added by the author of 
the book. 

162 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

effect would be produced in this case by a moderate dose 
of bogeymanwater.^* 

No. 3. (Uncle Sasha Kuzminski, Aunt Tanya's hus- 
band.) The patient formerly suffered from mania sena- 
torialis ambitiosa magna^ complicated by mania emolu" 
menti pecuniarii. Is now in process of being cured. The 
patient's malady expresses itself at present in the de- 
sire to unite the functions of his own yard-man ^^ with the 
calling of Presiding Judge of the District Court. General 
symptoms: unnatural quiet, want of self-confidence. Spe- 
cial symptoms : useless digging in the earth, and just as use- 
less reading of journalistic productions, and a fitful and 
gloomy disposition, expressing itself in outbursts of ill-tem^ 
per. Treatment : more intimate acquaintance with the ques- 
tions of life, more reckoning with reality, more gentleness 
and more confidence about those principles which he con- 
siders fundamental. 

No. 4. (Madame Seuron.) The patient suffers from 
comme-il-fautis simplex, complicated with vestiges of sacra- 
cordia catholica. General symptoms: want of clearness in 
view of life combined with resolute assuredness of manner. 
Actions are better than words. Special symptoms: frivolous 
conversation combined with strictness of life. The patient 
is strongly infected with the prevalent Blokhin-bank mania. 
Treatment: morality and love for her son. The prognosis 
is favorable. 

No. 5. (One of the daughters.) Suffers from seu- 
ronophilia, a very dangerous disease. Radical treatment: 
marriage. 

14 Bogey-man-water, i. e., to be scolded and frightened. 

15 Dvdrnik, concierge. 

163 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

No. 6. (Aunt Tanya.) The patient suffers from the 
mania known as mania demonica completica, a rare malady 
affording little hope of cure. The patient belongs to the 
dangerous category. Origin of the disease, success in youth 
and the habit of satisfied vanity with no moral principles 
of life. Symptoms: fear of imaginary personal devils and 
a particular affection for their works and for every sort of 
temptation to luxury, malice, and indolence. Anxiety 
about that life which does not exist, and indifference to 
that which does exist. The patient feels herself perpetually 
in the snares of the Devil, likes to be in his snares and at 
the same time is afraid of him. The patient suffers acutely 
from the epidemic mania of Blokhinism. The issue of the 
case is doubtful because recovery from the fear of the Devil 
is rendered possible only by renunciation of his works. But 
his works occupy the whole of the patient's life. Two dif- 
ferent treatments are possible: either complete surrender to 
the Devil and his works for the purpose of tasting all 
their bitterness, or complete estrangement of the patient 
from the works of the Devil. In the first alternative, two 
large doses of compromising coquetry, two million roubles, 
two months of complete idleness and a summons before the 
magistrate for words calculated to lead to a breach of the 
peace would have an excellent effect. In the second alterna- 
tive : three or four children to be nursed by the patient her- 
self, a life full of occupation and mental development. 
Diet: in the first alternative, truffles and champagne, frocks 
made entirely of lace, three new ones per diem. In the 
second alternative: shtchi (cabbage soup), kasha, with 
sweet curd-pies on Sundays and a dress of the same invari- 
able cut and color for the rest of her life. 

No. 7. (Seryozha Tolstoy, the son.) The patient suf- 

164 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

fers from a mania called universalis libertatis palaver. The 
patient belongs to the category of the nearly harmless. 
General symptoms: the desire to know whatever other peo- 
ple know, however useless to himself, and the lack of all 
desire to know what it is useful for him to know. Special 
symptoms: pride, self-assurance, and irritability. The case 
has not yet been fully investigated but the patient also 
suffers very acutely from the Prince Blokhin mania. Treat- 
ment: forced labor, and above all, service or love or both. 
Diet: less confidence in learning and profounder study of 
what he has already learned. 

No. 8. (The author of these "Reminiscences.") Mania 
Prochoris egoistica complicata. The patient belongs to the 
dangerous category. His hallucination consists in thinking 
that the whole world centers about him; and that the more 
insignificant and absurd the occupations are with which he 
is busied, the more interested the world will be in those oc- 
cupations. General symptoms : the patient cannot occupy 
himself with anything unless Prokhor is present to admire 
him. But inasmuch as the higher the order of occupations 
the smaller is the number of admiring Prokhors, the patient 
invariably descends to the lowest order of occupations. 
Special symptoms: the patient is excited to the point of 
ecstasy by every kind of approval, and without it sinks into 
apathy. The patient is strongly affected by ^he Blokhin epi- 
demic. A difficult case. The issue is two-fold: either the 
patient will get accustomed to submitting himself to the 
judgment of the inferior sort of people, the Prokhors, per- 
petually lowering himself in proportion to the facility of 
their approval, or this may disgust him and he may try 
tc take an interest in activities satisfactory to himself in- 
dependent of all Prokhors. Treatment: impossible. Diet: 

165 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

abstention from the society of people of a lower order of 
culture than himself. 

No. 9. The patient is subject to a complicated malady- 
called ma?iia metaphysica, complicated by hypertrophy of 
corrupted ambition, vanitas diplomatica highlifica. He suf- 
fers from the perpetual discord between his habits and his 
philosophy of life. General symptoms: low spirits and the 
desire to appear gay and lively, love of solitude. Special 
symptoms: reversion to old habits and discontent with him- 
self; excessive irritability and excitement in the communica- 
tion of his own ideas. The only treatment of undoubted 
efficacy is re-union with his family. 

No. 10. (Masha Kuzminski.) The patient has only 
lately arrived at the asylum, and has not yet been properly 
investigated but the following diagnosis has been arrived at : 
Mania kapnisto-meshtcheriano '^^-petersburgiana^ complicated 
with hypertrophia modestica. General symptoms: want of 
animation, lassitude, and dreaming of partners; the repeti- 
tion of convulsive movements of the feet at the sound of 
music, though without undulation of the body. Acutely 
subject to Blokhinismus simplex. Radical treatment 
needed: Bogeymanwater and strong affection for a good 
man. 

No. 11. Patient still subject to investigation. The pa- 
tient has so far shown clear symptoms of the mania known 
to Russian lunatic doctors as "Yernostiphikhotitude" i.e. 
his hallucination consists in thinking that what is wanted is 
not the thing itself or the feeling itself, or the knowledge 
itself, but something resembling the thing, the feeling, and 
the knowledge. Special symptoms: the desire to appear 

16 The adjectives are formed from the proper names Kapnist and 
Meshtchersky, friends of the Tolstoy family. 

166 




MIKHAIL, ANDREI, AND TATYANA, TOLSTOY S DAUGHTER 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

omniscient and to be remarked by every one. The malady 
is not very dangerous. Treatment, already begun to be 
applied: humiliation. 

No. 12. (Masha Tolstoy, the daughter.) Patient still 
under investigation. Belongs to the category of the per- 
fectly harmless. The symptoms which make her stay in 
the asylum still necessary are merely the following: pas- 
sion for eikon lamps, pointed toes, ribbons, bustles, etc. In- 
fected with the Prince Blokhin epidemic. Medical treat- 
ment not necessary; only the following diet: removal from 
the company of crazy people; after this the patient can be 
certified as cured. 

No. 13. (Vera Kuzminski.) Dangerous. The patient 
suffers from the mania known among Portuguese doctors 
as mania outspokianica honesta maxima. Pleasant exterior 
and the idea that every one is occupied with that exterior. 
Symptoms: shyness, placidity, and bursts of outspokenness. 
Acutely subject to the Prince Blokhin epidemic. Treat' 
ment: tenderness and love. Prognosis favorable. 

No. 14. The patient suffers from the mania known to 
English doctors as maxima anglica as-you-like-itude^'^ The 
patient's hallucination consists in thinking that you must 
not do what you want, but what other people want. Minor 
degree of the Prince Blokhin epidemic. Treatment: faith 
in what, in her heart of hearts, her conscience thinks 
right, and disbelief in what is considered so by other peo- 
ple. 

No. 15. Patient still under investigation. Hallucina- 
tion: roubles and Uncle Lalya. Belongs to the category 
of the perfectly harmless. Only faintly affected by Blok- 
hinism. Cure possible. 

'^'' The words "as-you-Hke" are in English in the original. 

169 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

No. 16.^^ Under investigation. Mania: doing up but- 
tons. Infected with Blokhinism. 

No. 17, 18, 19. Under investigation. Only faintly af- 
fected with Blokhinism. 

No. 20. (The baby, Sasha Tolstoy.) Still in charge of 
wet-nurse. Completely healthy and may be certified for 
removal without danger. In case of continued residence at 
Yasnaya Polyana is liable to undoubted infection, as she 
will soon discover that the milk which she enjoys was bought 
from the baby born of her wet-nurse. 

No. 21. (The idiot Blokhin.) Prince Blokhin. Mili- 
tary Prince, has passed through all ranks of nobility, Knight 
of all the Orders of Blokhin. The patient's hallucination 
consists entirely in this: that other people are bound to 
work for him, but he has only to receive money, keep an 
open bank, have carriages, horses, clothes, and luxuries of 
every description, and have a good time. The patient is 
not dangerous and can be certified as cured, together with 
No. 20. The fact that his. Prince Blokhin's, life, may 
be spent in enjoying himself while everybody else's must 
be spent in labor, is explained by the Prince, with perfect 
consistency, by the fact that he has passed through all the 
ranks of nobility, but no explanation of any sort can be 
given for an idle life in the case of other people. 

No. 22. (Uncle Seryozha, Sergei Nikolayevitch, Tol- 
stoy's brother.) The patient has already been investigated 
before, but has come back to the asylum for further treat- 
ment. He is not dangerous. He suffers from the mania 
known to Spanish doctors as mania katkoviana antiqua 
nobilis russica and from inveterate Beethovenophobia. 
General symptoms: after nourishment the patient experi- 

i^Nos. 16, 17, 18, 19 are the small children. — I. To 

170 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ences an irrepressible desire to have the Moskovskiya 
Vyedomosti ^^ read to him and is dangerous in this respect, 
that in insisting on having the Moskovskiya Vyedomosti 
read to him he is liable to use violence. After taking nour- 
ishment in the evening he becomes dangerous again at the 
sound of "The Spinner," ^^ stamping his feet, waving his 
arms and giving vent to savage outcries. Special symptoms: 
is unable to take up all his cards at once, but takes them 
into his hand one by one. Once a month, for a reason 
not yet ascertained, he drives into a town called Krapivna ^^ 
and passes his time there in the oddest and most unsuit- 
able occupations. Greatly preoccupied by female beauty. 
Treatment : friendship with peasants and intercourse with 
Nihilists. Diet: not to smoke, not to drink, and not to go 
to the circus. 

Lyof Tolstoy. 



A POEM BY MY FATHER, DEDICATED TO MY SISTER TANYA 

In the morning dressed in drab. 

Pink at dinner as a crab : 

What has worked the transformation 

From a grub to a carnation? 

If to know the cause you list 

You must go and ask Kapnist.^^ 

i^Katkof's daily paper. The organ of philosophic Tory na- 
tionalism. 

20 A certain Russian peasant-song. — I. T. 

21 Sergei Tolstoy was District Marshal of the noblesse. — I. T. 
In that capacity he would have to attend in Krapivna, the District 
chief town, to many sorts of business, presiding over the meeting 
of the District Zemstvo, the School and Land Boards, etc. 

22 My sister Tanya at that time often went on visits to Count 
Kapnist's house. — I. T. 

171 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

HEXAMETERS BY V. V. T. 

Boldly I set me to write a critique for the family Post-box: 

Little I found to praise, but many a matter of censure. 

Dipping my pen into poison, I harbored mercy for no one. 

What was the cause that my heart so suddenly stopped in 
its beating? 

Terrible qualms in the midriff, knees both quaking beneath 
me. 

Gods of Olympus declare the cause of my great trepida- 
tion! 

Harken, the Gods make answer, and Zeus the Thunderer 
speaketh : 

"Pitiful censor of others? Know'st thou not that a censor 

"Greater than thou thyself, Nikolai Nikolayevitch Strak- 
hof,23 

"Dwelleth in Yasnaya now, ready to go on the war-path, 

"Lay thee low in the dust with an epitaph writ on thy tomb- 
stone, 

"Full of the venom of hate, for a wholesome example to 
others?" 

Jupiter held his peace. Black night fell over the landscape. 

Still I quaked as I sat ; but at last recovered my courage, 

Henceforth vowing to write you my future adventures in 
rickety verses. 

23 A gentleman of remarkable benignity, though a critic by pro- 
fession; mentioned below in Chapter XIIL 



172 



CHAPTER XII 

SERGEI NIKOLAYEVITCH TOLSTOY 

I CAN remember my Uncle Seryozha (Sergei) 
from my earliest childhood. He lived at 
Pirogovo, twenty miles from Yasnaya, and 
visited us pretty often. 

As a young man he was very handsome. He had 
the same features as my father, but he was slenderer 
and more aristocratic-looking. He had the same 
oval face, the same nose, the same intelligent gray 
eyes, and the same thick overhanging eyebrows ; but 
the real difference between his face and my father's 
may be measured by the fact that in those distant 
days when my father cared for his personal appear- 
ance, he was always worrying about his ugliness, 
while Uncle Seryozha was universally considered, 
and really was, a very handsome man. 

This is what my father says about Uncle Seryozha 
in his fragmentary Reminiscences: 

I and Mitenka (Dimitri) were chums, Nikolenka I re- 
vered ; but Seryozha I admired enthusiastically and imi- 
tated ; ^ I loved him and wished to be him. I admired his 

1 The order of the Tolstoy family was as follows: Nikolai (d. 

173 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

handsome exterior, his singing — ^he was always a singer — 
his drawing, his gaiety, and above all, however strange a 
thing it may seem to say, his self-confident egoism,^^ 

I always remembered myself, was conscious of myself, 
always divined, rightly or wrongly, what others thought 
about me and felt towards me; and this spoilt the joy 
of life for me. This was probably the reason why I par- 
ticularly delighted in the opposite of this in other people, 
namely, self-confident egoism. That is what I especially 
loved in Seryozha; though the word "loved" is inexact. 
I loved Nikolenka, but I admired Seryozha as something 
alien and incomprehensible to me. It was a human life 
very beautiful, but completely incomprehensible to me, mys- 
terious, and therefore especially attractive. 

He died only a few days ago, and while he was ill and 
while he was dying he was just as inscrutable and just as 
dear to me as he had been in the distant days of our child- 
hood. 

In those latter days, in our old age, he was fonder of me, 
valued my attachment more, was prouder of me, wanted to 
agree with me but could not, and remained just the same as 
he had always been, namely, something quite apart, only 
himself, handsome, aristocratic, proud, and above all, truth- 
ful and sincere to a degree that I never met in any other man. 
He was what he was ; he concealed nothing and did not wish 
to appear anything different, 

I wanted to be with Nikolenka, to talk and think with 
him ; while Seryozha I only wanted to imitate. This imita- 
tion began from my earliest childhood, 

i860); Diraitri (d. 1856); Sergei (d. 1904); Lyof, the novelist; 
and Mary, the nun. 

la Literally, "The directness of his egoism," i. e., the immediate re- 
lation between his ego and that on which it acted, 

174 




TOLSTOY WITH THE WIFE OF HIS ELDEST BROTHER, COUNT SERGEI 
NIKOLAYEVITCH 

She had been a chorus girl in a Gipsy singing-troupe 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

We were always delighted when his barouche, 
drawn by three splendid horses abreast, in plated 
harness with bells, drove up to the house and out 
stepped Uncle Seryozha, in a broad-brimmed black 
felt hat and a long black overcoat, very handsome and 
"boyardlyo" Papa used to come out from his study 
to meet him, held his hand while he kissed him, and 
mama used to run out delightedly into the hall, ask 
after Marya Mikhailovna and the children, and then 
run to the kitchen to tell the cook to prepare some 
special dish "for our visitor," 

Uncle Seryozha never treated children affection- 
ately; on the contrary he seemed to put up with us 
rather than to like us ; but we always treated him with 
particular reverence, the result, as I can see now, 
partly of his aristocratic appearance, but chiefly of 
the fact that he called my father "Lyovotchka" and 
treated him just as my father treated us. He was 
not only not in the least afraid of him, but was al- 
ways teasing him, and argued with him like an elder 
person with a younger. We were quite alive to this. 

Of course every one knew that there were no faster 
dogs in the world than our black and white Darling 
and her daughter Winger. Not a hare could get 
away from them. But Uncle Seryozha said that the 
gray hares about us were sluggish creatures, not at all 
the same thing as steppe hares, and neither Darling 
nor Winger would get near a steppe hare. We lis- 

177 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

tened with open mouths and did not know which to 
believe, papa or Uncle Seryozha. 

Uncle Seryozha went out coursing with us one dayo 
A number of gray hares were run down, not one got 
away; Uncle Seryozha expressed no surprise, but 
still maintained that the only reason was because they 
were a poor lot of hares. 

We could not tell if he was right or wrong. Per- 
haps after all he was right, for he was more of a 
sportsman than papa and had run down ever so many 
wolves, while we had never known papa to run any 
wolves down. And afterwards papa only kept dogs 
because there was Agafya Mikhailovna to be thought 
of, and Uncle Seryozha gave up sport because it was 
impossible to keep dogs. "Since the Emancipation 
of the peasants," he said, "sport is out of the ques- 
tion; there are no huntsmen to be had; peasants turn 
out with sticks and drive the sportsmen off the fields. 
What is there left to do nowadays? Country-life 
has become impossible." 

ovaooooo 

In the summer we sometimes went over, the whole 
family together, to pay Uncle Seryozha a visit. 

It was a journey of twenty miles through open 
country to Pirogovo. On the road we passed 
Yasenki and Kolpna. It was somewhere there, my 
mother told us, that papa defended a soldier before a 
Court-martial for insulting an officer. He was con- 

178 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

demned and taken out at once and shot in the fields. 
It was horrible to think of. Perhaps it was in 
accordance with the law, but to us children it was 
incomp r ehensibl e . 

Further on the road went by Ozerka, past the 
mysterious bottomless lake; then by way of Cows' 
Tails and Sorotchinka; and at last, near a solitary 
shrine in the open field, you turned to the left off 
the main road, and in the distance beyond the Upa 
appeared a handsome church and a park, and in the 
depths of it an interesting-looking two-winged stone 
house of peculiar architectural style. 

As you drove up you became aware of a peculiar 
and unaccustomed shade of rigid squiredom pervad- 
ing the place ; not the sort we knew at Yasnaya, but 
a special Pirogovo sort You could already feel this 
atmosphere of squiredom as you drove through the 
village and the peasants stopped and bowed obse- 
quiously; you could feel it in the eyes of the women 
and children who looked after you as you went by; 
in the kitchen-boy who saw the carriage from afar and 
rushed helter-skelter into the house to announce the 
arrival of visitors; and in the whole look of the 
demesne, with its newly clipped bushes and its well- 
brushed "sweep" sprinkled with fresh sand. 

From the entrance-hall you went into the winter- 
garden, where lemon-trees grew in huge tubs ; in the 
zala stood a big stuffed wolf, and behind the sofa, on 

179 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

some kind of raised affair, lay a fox curled up, asleep, 
exactly as if it were alive. 

We were welcomed by the charming and always 
affectionate Marya Mikhailovna and her daughters, 
Vera, of the same age as Tanya, and the two little 
ones, Varya (Barbara) and Masha. 

When he heard the commotion Uncle Seryozha 
also came in from his room. He had a special room 
of his own off the zala. He slept in it and spent the 
whole day there over his accounts, reckoning up the 
in-comings of the property and writing up his 
account-books on a complicated system of book-keep- 
ing which nobody understood but himself. When 
you entered this room you had to do it quickly, shut- 
ting the door behind you as fast as you could, to pre- 
vent any flies from getting in. It was on account of 
the flies that the winter-frames were never taken out 
of the windows in this room and no one but Uncle 
Seryozha himself was allowed to put it to rights.^ 

Our host and hostess were always pleased to see 
their guests and welcomed us heartily; and Uncle 
Seryozha almost always began to tell "Lyovotchka" 
about the latest misfortunes that had happened on 
the estate. 

"It 's all very well for a bird of heaven like you 

2 In this Sergei Nikolayevitch resembled Levin's clever half- 
brother Sergei Ivanovitch in "Anna Karenina," who called out 
to his visitor to shut the door quickly for fear of the flies and never 
opened his windows except at night. 

180 




PEASANT S COTTAGE NEAR YASNAYA POLYANA 




A PUBLIC WELL NEAR YASNAYA POLYANA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

neither to sow nor to reap ; you write a novel, buy up 
property in Samara and there you are! But you 
should try it here for a bit. I 've had to give the 
new bailiff the sack; he had been robbing me all 
round. Vasili is managing again, so we have no 
coachman." 

Papa would smile and turn the conversation to 
another topic; while we children felt that this was 
all quite as it ought to be, for Vasili, who had been 
Uncle Seryozha's coachman for many years, was 
rarely to be seen on the box, but was almost always 
replacing some dishonest bailiff or another. 

It is wonderful how, in many traits of his charac- 
ter, Uncle Seryozha recalled old Prince Bolkonski in 
my father's "War and Peace." 

There is no doubt that the type was not copied 
from him; for at the time when "War and Peace" 
was written, Uncle Seryozha was still a young man. 
I have talked the question over with his eldest daugh- 
ter, Vera Sergeyevna, and we were both astonished 
at the prophetic clairvoyance of my father, who, in 
the relations of the Prince to his beloved daughter 
Princess Mary a, had described the relations of Uncle 
Seryozha to Vera, down to the very smallest details. 
Just the same mathematical lessons, the same shy 
and tender affection, hidden under a mask of indif- 
ference and often of seeming cruelty, the same pene- 
trating comprehension of her nature, and the same 

183 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

indomitable "boyardly" aristocratic pride, separating 
himself and her by an impassable barrier from all the 
rest of the world. A clearer incarnation of the 
type of old Prince Bolkonski it is impossible to im- 
agine. 

Being an unusually frank and honest man, Uncle 
Seryozha never sought to conceal any feature of his 
character — except one: he concealed the tenderness 
of his affections with the utmost shyness, and if it 
ever forced itself into the light it was only in excep- 
tional circumstances and then against his will. 

He shared to a very marked degree in a family 
characteristic which showed itself in my father too, 
namely, an extraordinary restraint in the expression 
of affection, which was often concealed under the 
mask of indifference and sometimes even of unex- 
pected harshness. 

In the matter of wit and sarcasm, on the other 
hand, he was strikingly original. He spent several 
winters in succession with his family in Moscow. 
One day when he and his daughter had just been at a 
historic concert given by Anton Rubinstein, and 
came on to take tea with us in Weavers' Row,^ my 
father asked him how he had liked the concert. 

"Do you remember Himbut, Lyovotchka^ 
Lieutenant Himbut, who was forester near Yasnaya? 
I once asked him what was the happiest moment of 

3 Khamovniki, a street in Moscow. 

184 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

his life. Do you know what he answered^ 'When 
I was in the Cadet Corps/ he said, 'they used to take 
down my breeches now and again and lay me across 
a bench and flog me. When they stopped, that was 
the happiest moment of my life.' Well, it was only 
during the entr'actes^ when Rubinstein stopped 
playing, that I really enjoyed myself." 

He did n't always spare my father. Once when I 
was out shooting with a setter near Pirogovo I drove 
in to Uncle Seryozha's to stop the night. 

I do not remember the subject of our conversation, 
but Uncle Seryozha averred that "Lyovotchka" was 
proud. 

"He is always preaching humility and non-resist- 
ance, but he is proud for all that. Mashenka's ^ sister 
had a footman called Forna. When he got drunk 
he used to get under the staircase, tuck up his legs 
and lie down. One day they came and told him that 
the Countess was calling him. 'She can come here 
and look for me if she wants me,' he answered. 
Lyovotchka is just the same. When Dolgoruki sent 
his chief secretary Istomin to ask him to come and 
have a talk with him about Syntayef ^ the sectarian, 
do you know what he answered^ 'Let him come 
here if he wants me.' Is n't that just like Forna*? 
No, Lyovotchka is very proud; nothing would in- 

* Mashenka, i. e. Marya Mikhailovna, his wife. 
5 See Chapter XVIII for this incident. 

185 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

duce him to go; and he was quite right; but it 's no 
good talking of humility." 

During the last years of Sergei Nikolayevitch's life 
my father was particularly friendly and affectionate 
with him and delighted in telling him all that he 
thought. He once lent him one of his books — I 
think it was "The Kingdom of God is within You" — 
and asked him to read it and tell him what he thought 
about it. 

Uncle Seryozha read the whole book through con- 
scientiously and, when he returned it, said: "Do 
you remember, Lyovotchka, how we used to travel 
post'? On some autumn day, when the mud was 
frozen into hummocks, you would be sitting in a 
tarantds ^ with unyielding frame-poles ; '^ you 'd be 
bumped in the back, and bumped in the sides ; the seat 
would jump out from under you; you would begin 
to feel as if you could n't stand any more of it, when 
suddenly out you 'd bowl onto the smooth highroad, 
and step into a beautiful Viennese calash drawn by 
four splendid horses. Well, when I was reading 
your book, there was only one place where I felt I 
had got into the calash. That was a passage from 
Hertzen, just a page, which you quote. All the rest, 

^Tarantas, a springless cart for cross-country traveling, where 
the roads are too rough for springs. It resembles a small boat 
on a small dray. 

7 Drozhina, the central pole connecting the fore and after axle- 
trees. 

186 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

all your own stuff, was just jolting in the taran- 
tdsr 

When he said things like that, Uncle Seryozha of 
course knew that my father would not be offended 
but would laugh heartily with him. It would have 
been difficult to arrive at a more unexpected con- 
clusion: and of course, no one but Uncle Seryozha 
would have ventured to say such a thing to my 
father. 

Uncle Seryozha told us that he once traveled with 
a lady, a complete stranger, who belonged to the order 
of button-holing railway bores. Discovering that 
she was in the same carriage with Count Tolstoy, 
brother of the famous writer, she began bothering him 
with questions about what Lyof Nikolayevitch was 
writing now, and whether Sergei Nikolayevitch also 
wrote. 

"I have n't a notion what my brother may be 
writing, madam; and as for myself, I never write 
anything but telegrams," answered Uncle Seryozha 
curtly, wishing to shut her up. 

"What a pity ! How often it happens like that in 
life! One brother has all the gifts, and another 
none," replied the lady sympathetically, and relapsed 
into silence. 

The question put to Sergei Nikolayevitch by the 
lady in the railway carriage as to whether he also 
wrote, must occur very forcibly to all who knew this 

187 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

clever and original man intimately. As a matter 
of fact, if he had written he would have gone far. 
He had plenty of matter for writing. 

Sitting year after year in his room, he spent his 
time in thinking and in living his own internal life. 
He would often begin to groan suddenly for no ap- 
parent reason and cry, "Ay, ay, ay ... ay, ay .. . 
ay!" His family could hear these groans many 
rooms away, and knew that it was "all right" ; an idea 
had struck him, that was all. 

It was only very, very rarely, when some one near 
and dear to him arrived, that he let himself go, and 
in animated and imaginative monologue developed 
his ideas and observations, which were always 
original, exact, and well-digested. Uncle Seryozha 
thought only for his own sake, and, like the self-confi- 
dent egoist that my father describes him as in the 
fragment of his reminiscences that I have cited 
above, never felt any necessity for sharing his intel- 
lectual adventures with others. And that was his 
great misfortune. He was deprived of that feeling 
of satisfaction which the writer experiences when he 
pours out the superfluity of his ego on paper, and for 
want of this safety-valve he overloaded himself and 
became an intellectual Stylites. 

A. A. Fet in his "Reminiscences" describes the 
character of the three Tolstoy brothers with ex- 
traordinary perspicacity : 

188 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

I am convinced that the fundamental type of all the 
three Tolstoy brothers was identical, just as the type of all 
maple-leaves is identical, in spite of the variety of their 
configuration. And if I set myself to develop the idea, I 
could show to what a degree all three brothers shared in 
that passionate enthusiasm, without which it would have 
been impossible for one of them to turn into the creative 
artist Lyof Tolstoy. The difference of their attitude to 
life was determined by the difference of the ways in which 
they turned their back on their unfulfilled dreams. Nikolai 
quenched his ardor in skeptical derision ; Lyof renounced his 
unrealized dreams with silent reproach; and Sergei, with 
morbid misanthropy. The greater the original store of 
love in such characters, the stronger, if only for a time, is 
their resemblance to "Timon of Athens." ("My Reminis- 
cences," 1848-89, by A. Fet. Part I, p. 296 of the Russian 
edition.) 

In the winter of 1901-1902 my father was ill in 
the Crimea, and for a long time lay between life and 
death. Uncle Seryozha, who felt himself getting 
weaker, could not bring himself to leave Pirogovo, 
and anxiously followed the progress of my father's 
illness from his own home by means of the letters 
which several members of our family wrote to him, 
and by the bulletins in the newspapers. 

When my father began to recover, I returned 
home, and on the way from the Crimea went to Piro- 
govo, in order to tell Uncle Seryozha personally 
about his illness and his actual condition. I remem- 
ber how joyfully and gratefully he welcomed me. 

i8g 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"How glad I am that you came ! Now tell me all 
about it. Who is with him"? All of them? And 
who nurses him most? Do you go on duty in turn? 
And at night too? He can't get out of bed. Ah, 
that 's the worst of all ! It will be my turn to die 
soon; a year sooner or later, what does it matter? 
But to lie helpless, a burden to every one, to have 
others to do everything for you, to lift you and help 
you to sit up — that 's what 's so awful ! . . . And 
how does he endure it? Got used to it, you say? 
No. I cannot imagine having Vera to change my 
linen and wash me. Of course she would say that 
it 's nothing to her; but for me it would be awful. 
And tell me, is he afraid to die? Does he say No? 
Very likely : he 's a strong man, he may be able to 
conquer the fear of it; yes, yes . . . perhaps he 's not 
afraid; but still . . . You say he struggles with the 
feeling? . . . Why, of course, what else can one do ? 
I wanted to go and be with him ; but I thought, how 
can I? I shall crock up myself, and then there will 
be two invalids instead of one. Yes, you have told 
me a great deal ; every detail is interesting. It is not 
death that 's so terrible, it 's illness, helplessness, and 
above all, the fear that you are a burden to others. 
That 's awful, awful !" 

Uncle Seryozha died in 1904 of cancer in the face. 
This is what my aunt, Maria Nikolayevna,^ the nun, 

8 Tolstoy's sister. See Chap. XXV. 

190 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

told me about his death. Almost to the last day he 
was on his legs, and would not let any one nurse him. 
He was in full possession of his faculties and con- 
sciously prepared for death. 

Besides his own family, the aged Maria Mikhai- 
lovna and her daughters, his sister, Maria Nikola- 
yevna, who told me the story, was with him too, and 
from hour to hour they expected the arrival of my 
father for whom they had sent a messenger to Yas- 
naya. They were all troubled with the difficult ques- 
tion whether the dying man would want to receive 
the Holy Communion before he died. Knowing 
Sergei Nikolayevitch's disbelief in the religion of the 
Church, no one dared to mention the subject to him 
and the unhappy Maria Mikhailovna hovered round 
his room wringing her hands and praying. They 
awaited my father's arrival impatiently, but were 
secretly afraid of his influence over his brother, and 
hoped against hope that Sergei Nikolayevitch would 
send for the priest before his arrival. 

"Imagine our surprise and delight," said Maria 
Tolstoy, "when Lyovotchka came out of his room 
and told Maria Mikhailovna that Seryozha wanted 
a priest sent for. I do not know what they had been 
talking about, but when Seryozha said that he wished 
to take the Communion Lyovotchka answered that he 
was quite right and at once came and told us what 
he wanted." 

191 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

My father stayed about a week at Pirogovo and 
left two days before my uncle died. When he re- 
ceived a telegram to say he was worse he drove over 
again, but arrived too late ; he was no longer living. 
He carried his body out from the house with his own 
hands, and bore it himself to the churchyard. When 
he got back to Yasnaya he spoke with touching affec- 
tion of his parting with this "inscrutable and be- 
loved" brother, who was so strange and so remote 
from him but at the same time so near and so akin. 



192 




TOLSTOY AND DR. D. L. NIKITIN IN THE CRIMEA 



CHAPTER XIII 

FET, STRAKHOF, GAY. 

'▼ TT THAT'S this saber doing here?' asked 
%/ %/ a young guardsman, Lieutenant Afa- 

▼ ▼ nasyi Afanasyevitch Fet, of the foot- 
man one day as he entered the hall of Ivan Sergeye- 
vitch Turgenyef's flat in St. Petersburg in the middle 
of the fifties. 

"It is Count Tolstoy's saber; he is asleep in the 
drawing-room. And Ivan Sergeyevitch is in his 
study having breakfast," replied Zakhar. 

"During the hour I spent with Turgenyef," says 
Fet in his Reminiscences, "we talked in low voices 
for fear of waking the Count who was asleep the 
other side of the door. 

" 'He 's like that all the time,' " said Turgenyef 
smiling; " 'Ever since he got back from his battery 
at Sebastopol,^ and came to stay here, he has been 
going the pace. Orgies, Gipsies, and gambling all 
night long; and then he sleeps like a dead man till 
two o'clock in the afternoon. I did my best to stop 
him, but have given it up as a bad job.' 

1 Tolstoy was in the artillery, and commanded a battery in the 
Crimea. 

195 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

" Tt was in this visit to St. Petersburg that I and 
Tolstoy became acquainted, but the acquaintance was 
of a purely formal character, as I had not yet seen a 
line of his writings, and had never heard of his name 
in literature, except that Turgenyef mentioned his 
"Stories of Childhood." ' " ^ 

Soon after this my father came to know Fet 
pretty intimately; they struck up a firm and lasting 
friendship and established a correspondence which 
lasted almost till Fet's death. It was only during 
the last year of Fet's life, when my father was en- 
tirely absorbed in his new ideas, which were at vari- 
ance with Afanasyi Afanasyevitch's whole philoso- 
phy of life, that they became at all estranged and 
met more rarely. 

From the very first stages of their acquaintance 
their paths were parallel. They got to know each 
other when they were both young officers and begin- 
ners in literature. - Then they both married — Fet 
considerably before my father — and both settled in 
the country. 

Fet lived at his farm, Stepanovka, in Mtsenski Dis- 
trict,^ not far from Turgenyef s property, Spasskoye- 
Lutovinovo, and at one time Turgenyef and my 
father, and his elder brother Nikolai, all used to meet 
at Fet's. They went out shooting black-cock and 

2 Tolstoy's "Childhood, Boyhood, Early Manhood" was published 
in 1856. 

3 In the province of Oryol. 

196 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

often migrated from there to Spasskoye and from 
Spasskoye to my uncle's at Nikolsko-Vyazemskoye. 
It was at Fet's, at Stepanovka, that my father and 
Turgenyef quarreled. 

Before the railway was made, when people still 
had to drive, Fet always used to turn in at Yasnaya 
Polyana to see my father on his way into Moscow, 
and these visits became an established custom. Aft- 
erwards, when the railway was constructed and my 
father was married, Afanasyi Afanasyevitch always 
broke his journey to come and see us as he passed, 
and if he omitted to do so, my father used to write 
him a letter of earnest reproaches and he used to apol- 
ogize as if he had been guilty of some fault. 

In those distant times of which I am speak- 
ing my father was bound to Fet by a common 
interest in agriculture as well as literature. Some 
of my father's letters of the sixties are curious 
in this respect. For instance, in i860, he writes a 
long dissertation on Turgenyef's novel "On the Eve" 
which had just come out, and at the end adds a post- 
script: "What is the price of a set of the best qual- 
ity of veterinary instruments? Also of a set of 
lancets and bleeding-cups for human use*?" In an- 
other letter there is a postscript: "When you are 
next in Oryol buy me six hundredweight of various 
ropes, reins, and traces," and, on the same page : "The 
passage, 'Tender art thou,' and the whole thing, 

197 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

is charming. You have never done anything better; 
it is all charming." The quotation is from Fet's 
poem, "The lingering clouds' last throng flies over 
us." 

But it was not only community of interests that 
brought my father and Afanasyi Afanasyevitch to- 
gether. The reason of their intimacy lay in the fact 
that, as my father expressed it, they "thought alike 
with their heart's mind." 

"Suddenly, from various imperceptible data, it 
became clear to me how deeply your nature was allied 
to mine," writes my father to Fet in 1876; and in the 
autumn of the same year he writes: "It is extraor- 
dinary how closely we are allied in mind and heart." 

My father said of Fet that his chief merit was that 
he thought quite independently, in his own ideas and 
images, instead of borrowing ideas and images from 
other people; and he counted him, together with 
Tyutchef,* among our best poets. 

Often, when Fet was dead, my father would recall 
some of his poems and, singling me out for some 
reason, would say: "Ilyusha, repeat those lines 'I 
thought' ... I can't remember what he thought; 
or The world 's asleep.' You must know them" ; 
and he used to listen with delight while I repeated 

*A poet of an older generation; a friend of Heine; regarded 
as the chief Russian poet of his day in 1854 by Turgenyef who 
preferred his "pure lyricalness" to the "captivating but rather monoto- 
nous grace of Fet." 

198 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

them, prompting me in his favorite passages, with 
tears sometimes rising to his eyes. 

• ••••••• 

I can remember Fet's visits from my earliest child- 
hood. He almost always brought his wife, Marya 
Petrovna, with him, and often stayed several days. 

He had a long black beard, turning gray, a clearly 
marked Jewish type of face and little feminine 
hands with remarkably long, well-cared-for nails. 
He spoke in a deep bass voice and broke re- 
peatedly into a long-drawn cough, that rattled like 
small shot. Then he would stop and rest, with his 
head bent down, and a long Hm! . . . hm-m-m! 
. . . stroke his beard awhile and then go on talking. 

Sometimes he was extremely witty and enter- 
tained the whole house with his jokes. His jokes 
were all the better because when they came they were 
always quite unexpected even by himself. I think it 
was Fet who was responsible for our footman Yegor's 
discomfiture. While Yegor was handing round the 
blancmange, dressed up for "company" in a red 
waistcoat, one of the visitor's jokes was too much for 
him and he burst out laughing so lustily that he had 
to put the dish down on the floor and run out of the 
room, to the general delight of the whole company. 

My sister Tanya used to give a capital imitation 
of Fet reciting his own poetry : 

"Here is the portrait, li-i-ike and yet unli-i-ike, 
199 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

hm . . . hm . . . Wherein the li-i-ikeness and the 
unli-i-ikeness li-i-ie, hm . . . hm . . . hm . . . 
hm-m-m-m." 

In early childhood one is not much interested in 
poetry. Poetry, one imagines, was invented only 
for us to have to learn it by heart. I got so sick of 
Pushkin's "The children ran into the hut" ^ and 
Lermontof's ''Angel" ^ which I was made to learn, 
that I never relished poetry for a long time after- 
wards and sulked over every poem as if it were a 
punishment. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, 
that I quite disliked Fet as a child and supposed 
that he and papa were friends only because he was 
"rather an ass." It was only in much later years that 
I came to understand him and to love him as a poet, 
as he deserves to be loved and understood. 



I also remember Nikolai Nikolayevitch Strakhof's 
visits. He was a remarkably quiet and modest 
man. He appeared at Yasnaya Polyana in the 
beginning of the seventies and from that time forth 
came and stayed with us almost every summer till 
he died. 

He had big, gray eyes, which he always kept wide 

5 The first line of Pushkin's poem "The Drowned Man." 

6 English readers may know this as a song of Rubinstein's, a 
duet for female voices. 

200 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

open, as if in astonishment; a long beard with a 
touch of gray in it; and when he spoke, at the end 
of every sentence he gave a shy laugh : Ha, ha, ha ! 
When he addressed papa he always said "Lef Nikol- 
ayevitch" instead of "Lyof Nikolayevitch" like 
other people, pronouncing the e thin J 

He always slept downstairs in my father's study, 
and spent his whole day there reading or writing, 
with a thick cigarette, which he rolled himself, in his 
mouth. 

An hour before dinner, when the katki or outside- 
car, drawn by two horses, was brought round to the 
front door and we all assembled to drive to the 
bathing-place, Nikolai Nikolayevitch used to come 
out of his room in a soft gray hat, with a towel and 
walking-stick, and drive with us. Every one with- 
out exception, grown-ups and children alike, was 
fond of him, and I cannot imagine his ever having 
been disagreeable to any one. 

He used to repeat a humorous poem beginning 
'Tades the leaf" by Kozma Prutkof ^ in the most 

7 The Russian vowel sound yo always represents an etymological 
e, as 'vyoz, he carried (in a cart) from vezti, to carry. The name 
Lyof, Leon, is generally distinguished from its congener, lef, a lion, 
by this thickening of the vowel. 

8 Kozma Prutkof was the pseudonym under which three poets, 
including the other Tolstoy, Count Alexey, published some comic 
and satirical verses in the fifties. The point of this one was that 
in the autumn Junker Schmidt was gloomy and wanted to shoot 
himself, but after thinking it over repented in the Spring! 

201 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

delightful manner, and we children used to go on 
plaguing him with demands for it, until he broke out 
laughing and recited the whole thing from beginning 
to end. 

"Oh, Junker Schmidt, believe me truly 
Summer will come back," 

he used to wind up emphatically, and never failed 
to grin and say ''Ha, ha, ha !" at the last word. 

I was particularly fond of him because he gave me 
a wonderful illustrated butterfly-book and taught me 
how to dry specimens for my collection. 

Strakhof and my father came together originally 
on a purely business footing. When the first part of 
my father's Alphabet and Reading Book was 
printed Strakhof had charge of the proof-reading. 
This led to a correspondence between them of a busi- 
ness character at first, later developing into a philo- 
sophical and friendly one. 

While he was writing "Anna Karenina," my 
father set great store by his opinion and valued his 
critical instinct very highly. "It is enough for me 
that that is your opinion," he writes in a letter of 
1872, probably apropos of the Alphabet. 

In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karenina" this time, 
my father writes : "You ask me whether you have 
understood my novel aright, and what I think of 
your opinion. Of course you understood it aright. 
Of course I am overjoyed at your understanding of 

202 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

it; but it does not follow that everybody will under- 
stand it as you do." 

But it was not only his critical work that drew my 
father to Strakhof.^ My father disliked critics as 
a rule and used to say that the only people who 
took to criticism were those who had no creative fac- 
ulty of their own. "The stupid ones judge the 
clever ones," he said of professional critics. What 
he valued most in Strakhof was the profound and 
penetrating thinker. Even in general conversation, 
whenever my father put him any scientific question 
— Strakhof was a scientist by education — I remem- 
ber the extraordinary exactness and clearness of his 
answers. It was like a lesson by a good teacher. 

"Do you know the thing that most struck me 
about you?" writes my father in oae of his letters. 
"It was the expression of your face when you once 
came in from the garden by the balcony door, not 
knowing that I was in the study. This expres- 
sion, remote, concentrated and severe, explained you 
to me, of course with the help of all that you had 
written and said. I am convinced that you are pre- 
destined for a purely philoksophical career. . . . You 
have one quality which I never met in any other 
Russian ; that is, besides having clearness and brevity 
in expression, you have softness combined with 

9 Strakhof was a literary critic by profession and achieved a 
considerable celebrity. 

205 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

strength; you do not tear a thing with your teeth, 
but with soft strong paws." 

Strakhof was a "real friend" of my father's — my 
father described him so himself — and I recall his 
memory with deep affection and respect. 

At last I have come to the memory of the man who 
was nearer in spirit to my father than any other 
human being, namely Nikolai Nikolayevitch Gay. 

Grandfather Gay, as we used to call him, made my 
father's acquaintance in 1882. While living on his 
farm in the Province of Tchernigof, he chanced to 
read my father's pamphlet "On the Census," and 
finding a solution in it of the very questions which 
were troubling him too at the time, he started out 
without delay and hurried into Moscow. 

I remember his first arrival, and I have always 
retained the impression that from the very first words 
they exchanged he and my father understood each 
other and found themselves speaking the same lan- 
guage. 

Just like my father, Gay was at this time passing 
through a great spiritual crisis ; and, traveling almost 
the same road as my father in his search after truth, 
he had arrived at the study of the Gospel and a new 
understanding of it. 

"For the personality of Christ," writes my sister 
Tatyana, in her article on him called "Friends and 

206 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Visitors at Yasnaya Polyana," ^^ "he entertained a 
passionate and tender affection, as if for a near and 
familiar friend whom he loved with all the strength 
of his soul." Often, during heated arguments, 
Nikolai Nikolayevitch would take from his pocket 
the Gospel, which he always carried about with him 
and read out some passage from it appropriate to the 
subj ect in hand. "This book contains everything that 
a man needs," he used to say on these occasions. While 
reading the Gospel he often looked up at the person 
he was talking to and went on reading without look- 
ing down at the book again. His face glowed at 
such moments with so much inward joy, that one 
could see how near and dear the words he was reading 
were to his heart. He knew the whole Gospel almost 
by heart, but he said that every time he read it he 
enjoyed a new and genuine spiritual delight. He 
said that not only was everything intelligible to him 
in the Gospel, but that when he read it he seemed to 
be reading in his own soul and felt himself capable of 
rising higher and higher towards God and merging 
himself in Him. 

When he came to Weavers' Row, Nikolai Niko^ 
layevitch offered my father to paint a portrait of my 
sister Tanya. "In return for all the good you have 
done me," he said. My father asked him to paint 
my mother instead, and the next day Gay brought 

10 Vyestnik Evrdpy, November, 1904. — I. T. 

207 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

paints and canvas and set to work. I do not remem- 
ber how long he was over it, but in the end, in spite 
of the innumerable remarks which were volunteered 
on every hand by the spectators interested in his 
work, all of which Gay listened to attentively and 
took into consideration, or perhaps because of those 
observations, the portrait was a failure, and Nikolai 
Nikolayevitch destroyed it with his own hands. 

As a scrupulous artist he would not content him- 
self with a merely external resemblance, and when 
he had painted "a lady in a velvet dress, with four 
thousand pounds in her pocket" he was disgusted 
with the result, and resolved to do the whole thing 
afresh. It was not till some years afterwards, when 
he knew my mother better and loved her that he 
painted the portrait of her, three-quarter length, with 
my three-year-old sister Sasha in her arms. 

"Grandfather" often came and stayed with us 
both in Moscow and at Yasnaya and from the mo- 
ment of first acquaintance he became quite one of the 
family. When he painted my father's portrait in 
his study in Moscow, my father got so used to his 
presence, that he paid no attention to him whatever 
and worked as if he were not in the room. It was 
in this study that "Grandfather" slept. 

He had an extraordinarily charming and intel- 
lectual face. His long gray curls, hanging all round 
his bald head, and his wide-open intelligent eyes, 

208 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

gave him a sort of biblical, prophetic look. When 
he got excited in conversation — and he always got 
excited whenever Gospel doctrine of Art was touched 
on — with his shining eyes and large energetic ges- 
tures, he gave the impression of a missionary 
preacher, and it is odd that even when I was sixteen 
or seventeen years old and religious questions had no 
interest for me, I loved to listen to "Grandfather's" 
sermons and was never bored by them. One may 
infer therefore that they gave the impression of great 
sincerity and love. 

Under my father's influence Nikolai Nikolaye- 
vitch took once more to artistic work, which he had 
hitherto given up for some time,^^ and his last pro- 
ductions "Christ before Pilate," "What is Truth'?" '^ 
"The Crucifixion" and others are the fruit of his new 
understanding and interpretation of Gospel sub- 
jects, greatly inspired in him by my father. Before 
beginning a picture. Gay used to nurse it in his head 
for a long time, and always imparted his intentions 
in conversation or by letter to my father, who was 
keenly interested in his ideas and sincerely delighted 

11 When he made Tolstoy's acquaintance he had some political 
post in Little Russia. 

12 Gay's "What is Truth?" is reproduced in Mr. Aylraer Maude's 
excellent book, "The Life of Tolstoj'" (from which many of the 
notes in this translation are drawn), together with the portrait of 
Tolstoy painted in his study at Moscow, and portraits of the 
daughters, Tanya and "Little" Masha. Gay also carved a bust 
of Tolstoy, and illustrated "What Men Live By." 

209 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in his penetrating discernment and masterly tech- 
nique. 

Nikolai Nikolayevitch's friendship was very dear 
to my father. He was the first man who whole- 
heartedly shared his convictions and loved him with- 
out reserve. Having set out in search of truth and 
serving it, as they did, with all their might, they 
found support in one another and told one another 
of their kindred experiences. Just as my father 
carefully followed Gay's artistic work, so Gay never 
let a word that my father wrote escape him ; he copied 
out his manuscripts himself and begged us all to 
send him everything new that he produced. They 
both gave up smoking and became vegetarians at the 
same time. 

They agreed also in their love of manual labor 
and in the realization of the necessity for it. 

It appeared that Gay was very good at building 
stoves ^^ and that he did all the stove-building at 
home on his farm for his own people and for the 
peasants in the village. When my father heard this, 
he asked him to make a stove for a widow at Yas- 
naya, for whom he had just built a clay house. ^^ 
"Grandfather" put on his apron, and set about it at 
once. He was master-builder and my father was his 
"mate." 

1^ The large brick stoves, that is, which stand out from the wall 
in Russian houses. 

1* Of soft clay held together by straw. 

210 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Nikolai Nikolayevitch died in 1904. 

When the telegram arrived at Yasnaya announc- 
ing his death, my sisters Tatyana and Masha were so 
overwhelmed by the news that they could not bring 
themselves to tell my father. My mother had to 
undertake the painful duty of showing him the tele- 
gram herself. 



211 



CHAPTER XIV 

TURGENYEF 

I DO not mean to recount all the misunderstand- 
ings which existed between my father and 
Turgenyef, and which ended in a downright 
quarrel in 1861. The actual external facts of that 
story are common property and there is no need to 
repeat them.^ According to general opinion, "the 
quarrel between the two greatest writers of the day" 
arose out of their literary rivalry. It is my intention 
to show cause against this generally received opinion, 
and before I come to Turgenyef's visits to Yasnaya 
Polyana, I want to make as clear as I can the real 
reason of the perpetual discords between these two 
good-hearted people, who had a cordial affection for 
each other, discords which led in the end to an out- 
and-out quarrel and the exchange of mutual defiance. 
As far as I know, my father never had any serious 
difference with any human being during the whole 
course of his existence, except Turgenyef. And 

1 Fet, at whose house the quarrel took place, tells all about it in 
his Memoirs (See Aylmer Maude's "Life"). Tolstoy dogmatized 
about ladylike charity, apropos of Turgenyef's daughter. Turgen- 
yef, in a fit of nerves, threatened to box his ears. Tolstoy chal- 
lenged him to a duel, and Turgenyef apologized. 

212 




THE day's mail 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Turgenyef, in a letter to my father in 1865, writes: 
"You are the only man with whom I have ever 
had misunderstandings." Whenever my father re- 
lated his quarrel with Ivan Sergeyevitch he took all 
the blame for it on himself. Turgenyef, immedi- 
ately after the quarrel, wrote a letter apologizing to 
my father and never sought to justify his own part 
in it. 

Why was it that, as Turgenyef himself put it, his 
"constellation" and my father's "moved in the ether 
with unquestioned enmity" ? 

This is what my sister Tatyana wrote on the sub- 
ject in her article "Turgenyef," published in the 
Supplement to the Novoye Vremya^ February 2, 
1908: 

All question of literary rivalry, it seems to me, is utterly 
beside the mark. Turgenyef, from the very outset of my 
father's literary career, acknowledged his wonderful tal- 
ents, and never dreamed of rivalry with him. From the 
moment when, so early as 1854, he wrote to Kolbasin, "If 
Heaven only grant Tolstoy life, I confidently hope that 
he will surprise us all," he never ceased to follow my 
father's work with interest and always expressed his un- 
bounded admiration of it. 

"When this young wine has done fermenting," he 
writes to Druzhinin ^ in 1856, "the result will be a 
liquor worthy of the gods." 

2 Druzhinin, a well known critic of the fifties. 

215 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

In 1857 he writes to Polonski : ^ "This man will 
go far, and leave deep traces behind him." 

Nevertheless, somehow these two men never could 
"hit it off" together. When one reads Turgenyef's 
letters to my father, one sees that from the very be- 
ginning of their acquaintance misunderstandings 
were always arising, which they continually endeav- 
ored to smooth down or to forget, but which arose 
again after a time — sometimes in another form — 
necessitating new explanations and reconciliations. 

In 1 865 Turgenyef writes to my father : 

Your letter took some time reaching me, dear Lyof Nik- 
olayevitch. Let me begin by saying that I am very grate- 
ful to you for sending it to me. I shall never cease to love 
you and to value your friendship, although, probably 
through my fault, each of us will long feel considerable 
awkwardness in the presence of the other. ... I think 
that you yourself understand the reason of this awkwardness 
of which I speak. You are the only man with whom I 
have ever had misunderstandings. They have arisen, per- 
versely enough, from my unwillingness to confine myself 
to merely friendly relations with you. I have always 
wanted to go further and deeper than that; but I set about 
it clumsily; I irritated and upset you, and when I saw my 
mistake, I drew back, too hastily perhaps; and that was 
the cause of this "gulf" between us. 

But this awkwardness is a mere physical sensation, noth- 
ing more ; and if when we meet again you see the old "mis- 
chievous look in my eyes," believe me, the reason of it will 

3 Polonski, the poet. See Chapter XIX, p. 223. 

216 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

not be that I am a bad man. I assure you that there is 
no need to look for any other explanation. Perhaps I may 
add also, that I am much older than you, and have traveled 
a different road. . . . Outside of our special, so-called "lit- 
erary" interests, I am convinced, we have few points of 
contact. Your whole being stretches out its hands towards 
the future; mine is built upon the past. For me to follow 
you is impossible. For you to follow me is equally out of 
the question. You are too far removed from me, and be- 
sides, you stand too firmly on your own legs to become any 
man's disciple. I can assure you that I never attributed any 
malice to you, never suspected you of any literary envy. I 
have often thought, if you will excuse the expression, that 
you were wanting in common sense, but never in goodness. 
You are too penetrating not to know, that if either of us 
has cause to envy the other, it is certainly not you that have 
cause to envy me. , . . 

The following year Turgenyef wrote a letter to my 
father which, it seems to me, provides the key to the 
understanding of his attitude towards him. 

You write that you are very glad you did not follow 
my advice and become a pure man of letters. I don't deny 
it; perhaps you are right; still, batter my poor brains as I 
may, I cannot imagine what else you are if you are not a 
man of letters: a soldier^ a squire? a philosopher? the 
founder of a new religious sect? a civil servant? a man 
of business ? . . . Please help me out of my difficulties and 
tell me which of these suppositions is correct. I am joking, 
but I really do wish beyond all things to see you under 
weigh at last with all sails set. <> . • 



217 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

It seems to me that Turgenyef, as an artist, saw 
nothing in my father beyond his great literary talent, 
and was unwilling to allow him the right to be any- 
thing besides an artist and a writer. Any other line 
of activity on his part offended Turgenyef, as it were, 
and he was angry with my father because he did not 
follow his advice. He was much older than my 
father/ he did not hesitate to rank his own talent 
lower than my father's, and demanded only one thing 
of him, that he should devote all the energies of his 
life to his literary work. And lo and behold, my 
father would have nothing to do with his magnanim- 
ity and humility, he would not listen to his advice, 
but insisted on going the road which his own tastes 
and nature pointed out to him. Turgenyef's tastes 
and character were diametrically opposed to my 
father's. While opposition always inspired my 
father and lent him strength, it had just the opposite 
effect on Turgenyef. 

Being wholly in agreement with my sister's views, 
I will merely supplement them with the words uttered 
by my father's brother Nikolai Nikolayevitch, who 
said: "Turgenyef cannot reconcile himself to the 
idea that Lyovotchka is growing up and freeing him.- 
self from his tutelage." 

As a matter of fact, when Turgenyef was already 

4 Turgenyef was ten years older than Tolstoy. 

218 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

a famous writer no one had ever heard of Tolstoy, 
and, as Fet expressed it, there was only "some men- 
tion of his stories of childhood." 

I can imagine with what secret veneration a young 
writer, just beginning, like my father, must have 
regarded Turgenyef at that time. All the more, 
because Ivan Sergeyevitch was a great friend of his 
beloved eldest brother, Nikolai. 

I do not like to assert it positively, but it seems to 
me, that just as Turgenyef was im willing to confine 
himself to "merely friendly relations," so my father 
also felt too warmly towards Ivan Sergeyevitch, and 
that was the very reason why they could never meet 
without disagreeing and quarreling. In confirma- 
tion of what I say here is a passage from a letter 
written by V. Botkin, a close friend of my father's 
and of Ivan Sergeyevitch's, to A. A. Fet, immediately 
after the quarrel. 

I think that Tolstoy really has a passionately affectionate 
nature and he would like to love Turgenyef warmly, but 
unfortunately his impulsive feeling encounters nothing but 
a kindly, good-natured indifference, and he can by no means 
reconcile himself to that. 

Turgenyef himself said that when they first came 
to know each other my father dogged his heels "like 
a woman in love," and at one time he used to avoid 
him, because he was afraid of his spirit of opposition. 

219 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

My father was perhaps irritated by the slightly pat- 
ronizing tone which Turgenyef adopted from tht 
very outset of their acquaintance ; and Turgenyef was 
irritated by my father's "crankiness," which dis- 
tracted him from "his proper metier^ literature." 

In i860, before the date of the quarrel, Turgenyef 
writes to Fet : "Lyof Tolstoy continues to play the 
cranko It was evidently written in his stars. When 
will he turn his final somersault and stand on his 
feet at last?" Turgenyef felt just the same about 
my father's "Confession,*' which he read not long 
before his death. Having promised to read it, "to 
try to understand it" and "not to lose my temper," he 
"started to write a long letter in answer to the 'Con- 
fession,' but never finished it . . . for fear of be- 
coming contentious." In a letter to D. V. Grigoro- 
vitch he called the book, which was based, in his 
opinion, on false premises, "a denial of all live 
human life" and "a new sort of Nihilism." ' 

It is evident that even then Turgenyef did not un- 
derstand what a mastery my father's new philosophy 
of life had obtained over him, and he was inclined 
to attribute this enthusiasm along with the rest to the 
same continual "crankinesses" and "somersaults," to 
which he had formerly attributed his interest in 

5 "A Nihilist is a man who does not bow to any kind of author- 
ity, who does not accept any principle on trust, with however much 
reverence that principle may be invested." — ^Turgenyef's "Fathers 
and Sons." 

220 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

school-mastering, agriculture, the publication of a 
paper ^ and so forth. 



Ivan Sergeyevitch visited Yasnaya Polyana, 
within my memory, three times, namely in August 
and September in 1878, and the third and last time at 
the beginning of May in 1880. I can remember all 
these visits, although it is quite possible that some 
details have escaped me. 

I remember that when we expected Turgenyef on 
his first visit, it was a great event and the most 
anxious and excited of all the household was my 
mother. She told us that my father had quar- 
reled with Turgenyef and had once challenged him 
to a duel ; and that he was now coming at my father's 
invitation to effect a reconciliation. 

Turgenyef spent all the time sitting with my 
father, who during his visit even put aside his work, 
and once, in the middle of the day, my mother col- 
lected us all, at a quite unusual hour, in the drawing- 
room, where Ivan Sergeyevitch read us his story of 
"The Dog." I can remember his tall stalwart figure, 
his gray, silky, yellowish hair, his soft tread and 

^ Namely the Yasnaya Polyana, published from Tolstoy's own 
house, on education, in i86i and 1862. Tolstoy had opened several 
schools in the neighborhood by that time, and the teachers in them 
contributed to the paper. Tolstoy's own contributions are to be 
found in the collections of his works, and in separate editions, 
under the heading of "On Popular Education," etc. 

221 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

rather waddling walk, and his piping voice, quite out 
of keeping with his majestic exterior. He had a 
chuckling kind of laugh, like a child's, and when he 
laughed his voice was more piping than ever. 

In the evening, after dinner, we all gathered in the 
zala. At that time Uncle Seryozha, my father's 
brother, Prince Leonid Dmitryevitch Urusof, Vice- 
Governor of the Province of Tula, Uncle Sasha 
Behrs and his young wife, the handsome Georgian 
Patty, and the whole family of the Kuzminskis, were 
staying at Yasnaya. 

Aunt Tanya was asked to sing. We listened with 
beating hearts and waited to hear what Turgenyef, 
the famous connoisseur, would say about her sing- 
ing. Of course he praised it, — sincerely, I think. 

After the singing a quadrille was got up. All of 
a sudden, in the middle of the quadrille, Ivan 
Sergeyevitch, who was sitting at one side looking on, 
got up and took one of the ladies by the hand; and, 
putting his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waist- 
coat, danced a cancan according to the latest rules of 
Parisian art. Every one roared with laughter, 
Turgenyef more than anybody."^ 

After tea the "grown-ups" started some conversa- 
tion, and a warm dispute arose among them. It was 
Prince Urusof who disputed most warmly, and "went 

'' IVTro Maude quotes Tolstoy's diary, which relates the incident 
laconically: "Turgenyef, cancan: it is sad." 

222 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

for" Turgenyef. This was the time when my 
father's "spiritual birth," as he himself called the 
period, was just beginning; and Prince Urusof was 
one of his first sincere partizans and friends. I do 
not remember what Prince Urusof was arguing 
about; but he was sitting at the table opposite Ivan 
Sergeyevitch, making sweeping gestures with his arm, 
when suddenly an extraordinary thing happened : his 
chair slipped away from under him and he fell on 
the floor in the very attitude in which he had just 
been sitting on his chair, with his arm stretched out 
and his forefinger raised menacingly in the air.^ 

Quite undisturbed by the accident, he sat calmly 
where he was, still gesticulating, and finished the 
sentence he had begun.. 

Turgenyef looked him up and down and burst 
out laughingc 

"7/ m'assomme^ this Trubetskoy," he piped 
through his laughter, calling the Prince by the wrong 
name. Urusof was on the point of taking offense, 
but when he saw that everybody else was laughing 
too, he got up and joined in the general hilarity.. 

One evening we sat in the small drawing-room at 
the round table. It was a splendid summer night. 
Somebody, I think it was my mother, proposed that 
every one present should describe the happiest mo- 
ment of his lifco 

^This is the gigantic Warrior described in Chap. Vo 

225 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"You begin, Ivan Sergeyevitch," she said, turning 
to Turgenyef. 

"The happiest moment of my life was when I first 
read in the eyes of the woman I loved that she loved 
me in return," said Ivan Sergeyevitch and relapsed 
into thought. 

"It 's your turn now, Sergei Nikolayevitch," said 
Aunt Tanya, turning to Uncle Seryozha. 

"I '11 tell you; but I must whisper it in your ear," 
answered Uncle Seryozha, smiling his clever sarcastic 
smile. "The happiest moment of my life" . . . 

He finished the rest in a whisper, right into Tat- 
yana Andreyevna's ear, and I did not hear what he 
said. I only saw how Aunt Tanya drew back from 
him and laughed. 

"Ay, ay, ay ! You 're always saying things like 
that, Sergei Nikolayevitch. You 're an impossible 
man I" 

"What did Sergei Nikolayevitch say*?" asked my 
mother, who never understood a joke. 

"I '11 tell you afterwards." 

And that ended the game. 

On Turgenyef s second visit, I remember the wood- 
cock shooting. This was on the 2d or 3d of May, 
1880. We all went out together beyond the Vor- 
onka, my father, my mother and all the children. 
My father gave Turgenyef the best place and posted 
himself a hundred and fifty paces away at the other 

226 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

end of the same glade. My mother stood by Tur- 
genyef, and we children lit a bonfire not far off. My 
father fired several shots and brought down two 
birds ; Ivan Sergeyevitch had no luck and was envy- 
ing my father's good fortune all the time. At last, 
when it was beginning to get dark, a woodcock flew 
over Turgenyef, and he shot it. 

"Killed it?" called out my father from his place„ 

"Fell like a stone; send your dog to pick him up," 
answered Ivan Sergeyevitch. 

My father sent us with the dog, Turgenyef showed 
us where to look for the bird ; but search as we might, 
and the dog too, there was no woodcock to be found. 
At last Turgenyef came to help us, my father joined 
in the search; but still there was no woodcock to 
be found. 

"Perhaps you only winged it; it may have got 
away along the ground," said my father, puzzled. 
"It is impossible that the dog shouldn't find it; he 
could n't miss a bird that was killed." 

"I tell you I saw it with my own eyes, Lyof 
Nikolayevitch ; it fell like a stone ; I did n't wound it, 
I killed it outright; I can tell the difference." 

"Then why can't the dog find it? It 's impos- 
sible; there 's something wrong," 

"I don't know anything about that," insisted 
Turgenyef: "you may take it from me I 'm not lying; 
it fell like a stone I tell you„" 

. 227 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

There was no finding the woodcock, and the inci- 
dent left an uncomfortable atmosphere behind it, as 
if one or the other of them must have done something 
wrong. Either Turgenyef was bragging when he 
said that he shot it dead ; or my father was wrong in 
maintaining that the dog could not fail to find a bird 
that had been killed. And this must needs happen 
just when they were both so anxious to avoid every 
sort of misunderstanding ! That was the very reason 
why they had carefully fought shy of all serious con- 
versation and spent all their time merely amusing 
themselves. . . . 

When papa said good-night to us that evening, he 
whispered that we were to get up early and go 
back to the place to have a good hunt for the bird. 
And what was the result? The woodcock, in fall- 
ing, had caught in the fork of a branch, right at the 
top of an aspen-tree, and it was all we could do to 
knock it out from there. When we brought it home 
in triumph it was quite an "oGcasion," and my father 
and Turgenyef were far more delighted than we were. 
It turned out that they were both right, and every- 
thing ended to their common satisfaction. 

Ivan Sergeyevitch slept downstairs, in my father's 
study. When the party broke up for the night I 
used to see him to his room and while he was undress- 
ing, I sat on his bed and talked sport with him. He 
asked me if I could shoot. I said yes, but that I 

228 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

did n't care to go out shooting because I had nothing 
but a rotten old one-barreled gun. 

"I '11 give you a gun," he said. "I 've got two in 
Paris, and I have no earthly need for both. It's 
not an expensive gun, but it's quite a good one. 
Next time I come to Russia I '11 bring it with 
me." 

I was quite taken aback and thanked him heartily. 
I was tremendously delighted at the idea that I was 
to have a real "central-fire" gun. 

Unfortunately, Turgenyef never came to Russia 
again.^ I tried afterwards to buy the gun he had 
spoken of from his legatees, not because it was a "cen- 
tral-iire" gun, but because it was "Turgenyef's gun" ; 
but I did not succeed. 

That is all that I can remember about this delight- 
ful, naively-cordial man, with the childlike eyes and 
the childlike laugh, and in the picture my mind pre- 
serves of him the memory of his grandeur melts into 
the charm of his good-nature and simplicity. 

In 1883 my father received from Ivan Sergeye- 
vitch his last farewell letter, written in pencil on his 
death-bed; and I remember with what emotion he 
read it. When the news of his death came, my 
father could talk of nothing else for several days, and 

^ From Yasnaya Polyana Turgenyef went on to Moscow, for the 
opening of the Pushkin Memorial, and received one of the greatest 
ovations ever accorded to a Russian writer. On his return to Paris 
he developed cancer of the backbone from which he never recovered. 

229 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

enquired in every possible quarter for details of his 
illness and last days. 

Apropos of this letter of Turgenyef's, I should like 
to say that my father was sincerely annoyed, when 
he heard applied to himself the epithet "great writer 
of the land of Russia," ^^ which was taken from it. 

He always hated cliches^ and he regarded this 
one as quite absurd, 

"Why 'writer of the land'? I never knew be- 
fore that a man could be the writer of a land. 
People get attached to some nonsensical expression 
and go on repeating it in season and out of season," 

I have given extracts above from Turgenyef's let- 
ters, which show the invariable consistency with 
which he applauded my father's literary talents. 
Unfortunately I cannot say the same of my father's 
opinion of Turgenyef. In this again the want of 
dispassionateness in his nature revealed itself. Per- 
sonal relations prevented him from being objective 
and impartialo 

In 1867, apropos of Turgenyef's "Smoke" which 
had just appeared, he wrote to Fet: "There is 
hardly any love of anything in 'Smoke' and hardly 
any poetry. The only thing for which it shows any 
love is light and playful adultery, and for that rea- 
son the poetry of the story is repulsive, » o , I am 
timid in expressing this opinion, because I cannot 

10 Turgenyef's own wcrds were "of the Russian land." — I. T, 

230 




5 a 

. o 

a O 

u 



G ^ 









^ o 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

form a sober judgment about an author whose per- 
sonality I dislike." 

In 1865, before the final breach with Turgenyef, 
he writes, also to Fet: "I do not like 'Enough,' A 
personal, subjective treatment is never good unless 
it is full of life and passion; but the subjectivity in 
this case is full of lifeless suffering." " 

In the autumn of 1883, ^^^er Turgenyef 's death,*^ 
when the family had gone into Moscow for the win- 
ter, my father stayed at Yasnaya Polyana alone with 
Agafya Mikhailovna, and set earnestly about read- 
ing all Turgenyef 's works. 

This is what he wrote to my mother at the time, 

"I am always thinking about Turgenyef: I am 
intensely fond of him, and sorry for him and do noth- 
ing but read him. I live entirely with him. I shall 
certainly give a lecture on him, or write it and have it 
read; tell Yuryef.^^ 

*T have just been reading Turgenyef's 'Enough.' 
Read it; it is perfectly charming." 

Unfortunately, my father's intended lecture on 
Turgenyef never came off. The Government, in the 
person of the Minister Count D, A. Tolstoy, ^^ for- 

11 "Enough, the diary of a dead artist," 1864, is a short story, 
a record of the disillusionment of an artist before he commits 
suicide. 

12 He died in August, 1883, 

13 Editor of Russkaya Mysl. — I. T. Russian Thought, a Moscow 
monthly. 

1* D. A. Tolstoy, the most distant relation, or none, of Lyof 

233 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

bade him to pay this last tribute to his dead friend, 
with whom he had quarreled all his life only because 
he could not be indifferent to him. 

Nikolayevitch, was Minister of the Interior, Procurator of the Holy- 
Synod and President of the Academy of Science. In the first ca- 
pacity he represented the new regime of Alexander III by curbing 
the liberty of the press. He died in harness in 1889. 



234 



CHAPTER XV 

GARSHIN 

MY reminiscences of Vsevolod Mikhailovitch 
Garshin all date from my childhood, and 
diey are, in consequence, scanty and frag- 
mentary. 

He visited Yasnaya Polyana in the early spring 
of 1880. I have since learnt from his biography 
that this same spring he left the Province of Tula for 
Kharkof and was there put in a lunatic asylum. 
This explains certain oddities in the behavior of this 
modest and charming gentleman, certain peculiarities 
which startled us, and thanks to which I remember 
him so well as I do on his first visit to Yasnaya 
Polyana. It never occurred to any of us at the time 
that we had to do with a sick man, unhinged by the 
approach of his malady and consequently not quite 
normal. We attributed his oddities to mere eccen- 
tricity. He was not the first eccentric visitor we had 
had at Yasnaya by a long way ! 

It was between five and six in the evening. We 
were sitting round the big table in the zala just finish- 
ing dinner, when the footman, Sergei Petrovitch, as 

235 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

he handed round t±ie last dish, told my father that 
there was a "man" downstairs who wanted to see him. 

"What does he want^" asked my father. 

"He did n't say; he says he wants to see you." 

"All right; I'll be down in a minute." 

Without finishing his pudding, my father got up 
from the table and went downstairs. We children 
jumped up too and ran after him. 

In the hall stood a young man poorly dressed and 
with his overcoat on. My father said "How-do- 
you-do," and asked him what he wanted. 

"The first thing I want is a glass of vodka and the 
tail of a herring," said the man, looking into my 
father's eyes with a bold bright expression in his own 
and a childish smile. Quite unprepared for any such 
answer my father was considerably taken aback for a 
moment. The reply seemed so extraordinary, com- 
ing from an apparently sober, well-mannered, edu- 
cated man. What sort of queer fish was this^ 

My father looked at him again with that profound 
and piercing glance of his, met his eyes once more and 
broke into a broad smile. 

Garshin smiled back, like a child which has just 
tried to be funny and looks into its mother's eyes to 
see if its little joke is well received. And it was well 
received. Or rather, it was not the joke that found 
favor, but the child's eyes, at once so luminous and 
so deep. 

236 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

There was so much frankness, so much spirituality 
in this man's gaze, and at the same time so much pure 
childish good-humor, that when one met him it was 
impossible not to feel an interest in him and take him 
to one's heart. 

Evidently that was what Lyof Nikolayevitch felt 
too. 

Telling Sergei to bring some vodka and some sort 
of zakuska he opened the study-door and asked Gar- 
shin to take off his overcoat and come in. 

"You must be frozen I" he said kindly, examining 
his visitor with an attentive air. 

"I don't know; I dare say I am a bit; I 've been 
traveling a long time." 

After a glass of vodka and a zakuska, Garshin told 
my father his name and said that he "wrote a bit." 

"And what have you written"?" 

" Tour Days.' It 's a story that they published 
in the Otetchestvennya Zapiski} You probably 
have n't heard of it." 

"Why of course, I remember it well. So it was 
you who wrote that*? A capital story! Heard of 
it? I paid it very particular attention. So you 
were in the war?" 

iThe Fatherland Record, a monthly magazine and review, pub- 
lished in St. Petersburg. The story "Four Days on the Battlefield," 
describing the experiences of a soldier wounded in the Russo- 
Turkish War, is very well known and has been translated into 
English. 

237 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Yes, I was through the whole campaigno" ^ 

"What a lot of interesting things you must have 
seen! Come, tell us all about it; this is very inter- 
esting." 

And my father questioned Garshin systematically 
and at length about his experiences. He sat beside 
him on the leather sofa, and we children ranged our- 
selves in a semicircle about them. 

Unfortunately I do not remember this conversa- 
tion in detail and I cannot undertake to record it. I 
only remember that it was extremely interesting. 
The man who so startled us in the hall had ceased 
to exist by now. Before us sat an intelligent and 
charming companion, giving us a vivid and faithful 
picture of all the horrors of war that he had been 
through, and his account was so fascinating that we 
spent the whole evening there beside him, devouring 
him with our eyes and listening attentively to all that 
he said. 

Recalling that evening now, when I know that at 
that time poor Vsevolod Mikhailovitch was on the 
eve of a serious mental breakdown, and searching my 
impressions of him for signs of the approach of it, 
I can only say that, if he showed tokens of any ab- 
normality then, they consisted only in his talking 

2 Garshin threw up his University career to volunteer as a pri- 
vate for the war. He greatly distinguished himself by his courage, 
was wounded, and was mentioned in despatches. 

238 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

too much and too interestingly. With wide-open, 
brightly glowing eyes, he spread picture after picture 
before us, and the more he talked, the more pic- 
turesque and expressive grew his language. When 
he paused from time to time, the expression of his 
countenance changed, and the same gentle, charming 
child looked out at us as before. 

I do not remember whether he spent the night at 
Yasnaya, or whether he went away the same day. 

A few days later he came again, this time mounted 
on a horse with no saddle. We saw him from the 
window, riding down the avenue. He was talking 
to himself and waving his arms with large strange 
gestures. When he reached the house he got off his 
horse, held it by the reins, and asked us for a map 
of Russia. Some one asked him what he wanted 
it for. 

"I want to see which is the way to Kharkof . I am 
going to Kharkof to see my mother." 

"On horseback?" 

"On horseback. Why not?" 

We got him an atlas, and helped him to look out 
Kharkof ; he made a note of the towns he would have 
to pass on the way, said good-by, and left us. We 
heard afterwards that he had somehow contrived to 
purloin the horse he came on from between the shafts 
of a cab in Tula. The cab-driver, who did not 
realize that he had to do with a man of disordered 

239 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

mind, spent a long time looking for his horse and had 
the greatest difficulty in getting it back. 

After this Garshin disappeared. How he got to 
Kharkof, and how he came to be put in the asylum, 
I do not knowo 

A few years later two little booklets of his stories 
were publishedo^ I read them when I was grown up 
and there is no need for me to say what a deep impres- 
sion they made on me. Could they have been writ- 
ten by that man with the wonderful eyes, who sat 
on the leather sofa in the study that night, and told 
us all those interesting stories ? Yes, yes ; of course 
it was the same man, and I recognized him in the 
two books. But now the passing childish interest in 
a stranger who had chanced to cross my path, was 
transformed into deep affection for the man and the 
artist and I am glad that I can still recall even these 
sad and fragmentary memories of himc 

I had the good fortune to see Garshin once more, at 
our house in Moscow. This was about a year before 
his death. I think my father was out at the time 
and it was my mother who received him. He was 
gloomy and silent and did not stay long. I remem- 
ber my mother asking him why he wrote so little. 

"How can I write when I am busy all day at my 
work, which stupefies me and makes my head ache*?" 

3 One of these "booklets" was "The Red Flower," the tale of a 
lunatic, his sufferings and his hallucinations, the fruit of Garshin's 
own experiencCo 

240 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

he answered bitterly and fell into a reverie.* 

My mother questioned him about his home life ^ 
and was very kindly and sympathetic with him. 

I was struck once more by his big, handsome eyes, 
deeply shaded by long eyelashes, and I involuntarily 
compared them with his eyes as I had seen them be- 
fore. They were just the same; but the first time 
they had been alive with energy and courage, and 
now they were sad and pensive. Life had robbed 
them of their brilliance and drawn a film of sorrow 
over them. This sorrow revealed itself in all his 
being. One wanted to talk softly and tenderly with 
him, to take him to one's bosom, as it were, and caress 
him. When I heard of his death I was not surprised^ 
Such men do not live long. 

Answering, according to my own impression, the 
question which my mother put to him, why he wrote 
so little, I should be inclined to apply to him what 
Turgenyef said of Nikolai Nikolayevitch Tolstoy, 
my father's brother: 

"He wrote little because he had all the good quali- 
ties but none of the failings which a man needs to be 
a great writer." 

* Garshin had some light employment as Secretary to a Railway 
Committee, something after the manner of that "Joint Board of the 
Associated Clearing-Houses of the Southwestern Railway System" 
that Tolstoy makes fun of in "Anna Karenina." He killed himself 
in 1888, at the age of 33, in a fit of melancholia, a malady to which 
he was always subject in the spring. 

•''• He had lately married a lady-doctor. 

241 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE FIRST "dark PEOPLE." THE ASSASSINATION OF 
ALEXANDER II. THE SPY. 

THE revolutionary movement in Russia, which 
led to the ist of March, 1881,^ hardly 
affected Yasnaya Polyana, and we knew of 
it only from newspaper accounts of various at- 
tempts at assassination, which were repeated almost 
every year at that period. 

My father was visited from time to time by certain 
"dark people," ^ whom he received in his study, and 
with whom he always argued warmly. As a rule 
these unkempt and unwashed visitors appeared no 
more than once, and then, meeting with no encour- 
agement from my father, disappeared forever. The 
only ones who came back were those who were inter- 
ested in hearing of my father's Christian ideas for the 
first time, and from my childhood onwards I can 
remember certain "Nihilists," who often turned up 

1 March 13th, new style: the date of the assassination of Alex- 
ander 11. 

2 That is, proletarians. The author uses the word here in ref- 
erence to educated people, who for political purposes, or on prin- 
ciple, had "gone into the people" and become peasants or tramps. 

242 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

again at Yasnaya and under my father's influence 
gave up terrorism altogether. 

"The Revolutionary and the Christian," said my 
father, "stand at the two extreme points of an un- 
completed circle. Their nearness is therefore illu- 
sory: in reality there are no two points further re- 
moved from each other. If they are to come 
together they must turn right back and traverse the 
whole circumference." 

This is how the news of the assassination of Alex- 
ander II reached us. 

On the first of March my father had gone out, ac- 
cording to custom, for a walk on the main road before 
dinnefo A thaw had set in after a snowy winterc 
Deep thaw-holes had formed in the snow on the 
roads, and the hollows were full of water. Owing 
to the bad conditions of the roads we had given 
up sending into Tula and there were no news- 
papers. 

On the main road he met a wandering Italian 
organ-grinder, with his barrel-organ and fortune- 
telling birds. He was traveling on foot from Tula. 
They got into conversation. 

"Where do you come from? Where are you go- 
ing to?" 

"Me from Tula. Business bad, very bad: me get 
no eat, birds get no eat. Tsar get killed." 

243 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Tsar'? What Tsar? Who killed him? When?" 

"Russian Tsar, Petersburg, throwed a bomb, seed 
a paper." 

When he got home my father at once told us of 
Alexander IPs assassination, and the papers which 
arrived the next day confirmed the news. 

I remember the overwhelming impression which 
this senseless murder produced on my father. Be- 
sides his horror at the cruel death of the Tsar, "who 
has done so much good to people and always wished 
them so much good, that good old man," he could not 
help thinking of the murderers, of the approaching 
executions, and "not so much about them as about 
those who were preparing to take part in their mur- 
der, and especially about Alexander III." 

For some days he went about wrapped in gloomy 
meditation, and at last bethought him to write a let- 
ter to the new Emperor, Alexander III. 

There was a great deal of talk about the style in 
which the letter was to be written, whether he was to 
use the method of address required by etiquette, or 
the method employed among ordinary mortals; 
whether he was to write it with his own hand or have 
it copied by Alexander Petrovitch Ivanof who was 
staying with us at the time. Good paper was sent 
for from Tula, the letter was altered and corrected 
and copied out fair again several times, and at last 
my father posted it off to St. Petersburg to N. N. 

244 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Strakhof, asking him to send it on to the Emperor 
through K. N. Pobyedonostsef. 

How firmly he believed then in the power of his 
own conviction ovc r others ! How he hoped that the 
criminals would be, not forgiven — he had no hope of 
that — ^but at any rate not executed! He devoured 
the newspapers eagerly and lived in hope and expect- 
ancy until he read that all the participators in the 
crime had been hangedo Pobyedonostsef had not 
even handed on the letter; he sent it back, because, 
as he said in a letter to my father, he was prevented 
"by his religion" from discharging such a commission. 

The letter afterwards came to the Emperor's hands 
through a friend. When he read it, Alexander III is 
reported to have said : "If the crime had concerned 
myself I should have had the right to pardon them, 
but I could not pardon them on my father's behalf." 

I remember that not only my father but we chil- 
dren too were horrified by this execution of several 
people, and a woman among them. At that time 
the death penalty was an exceptional event to which 
people were not yet accustomed.^ It was not like 
nowadays. 

As the years passed the number of "dark people" 
who visited Yasnaya Polyana began gradually to 

sThe punishment for murder in Russia is penal servitude. The 
death penahy is inflicted only by court-martial or by the civil 
courts under special powers from the Crown. 

247 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

increase. In the end there were hardly any revolu- 
tionaries among them; the majority of them were 
either people of the same way of thinking as my 
father, or people in search of truth, who came to him 
for advice and moral support. 

What a number of such folk came and went ! Of 
every age and every calling. What a number of sin- 
cere and deeply convinced people, and what a num- 
ber of Pharisees who only wanted to rub shoulders 
with the name of Tolstoy and get some advantage for 
themselves out of it ! What a number of cranks, one 
might almost say, of maniacs ! 

For instance there was an old Swede who came to 
Yasnaya Polyana and stayed a considerable time; 
he went about bare-footed and half naked summer 
and winter. His principle was "simplification" and 
getting near to Nature. My father was greatly in- 
terested in him at one time, but it ended in his going 
too far in the matter of "simplification," losing all 
sense of shame, and indeed, of decency, and having 
to be turned out of the house. 

Another time an individual turned up who only 
fed once in every two days. The day he arrived at 
Yasnaya was his day for not eating. The whole day 
from morning onwards there was food spread on the 
table, breakfast, tea, coffee, lunch, dinner, tea again 
with bread and butter and cakes; but he sat apart 
and ate nothing. 

248 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"I ate yesterday," he answered modestly when he 
was offered anything. 

"What do you eat the days you do eat*?" he was 
asked. 

It appeared that he ate precisely a pound of bread, 
a pound of vegetables and a pound of fruit. 

"And you're not so very thin!" said my father, 
astonished. 

We had pretty frequent visits from a tall fair 
morphino-maniac of the name of O., who proved the 
truth of Christianity by mathematical f ormulse ; then 
there was the short dark ne'er-do-well P. ; there was 
the converted Jew F. who lodged and worked in the 

village; and last of all came Zhenitchka S n, a 

spy sent down by the secret police.^ 

One day in summer as we were playing about in the 
garden we came on a young gentleman sitting in a 
ditch and calmly smoking a cigarette. Our dogs ran 
at him and barked. We secretly egged the dogs on 
and ran away ourselves in the opposite direction. 

A few days later we met the same young gentle- 
man on the road, not far from the house. When he 
saw us, he greeted us cheerfully and entered into con- 
versation. It appeared that he had settled in lodg- 
ings in the village, at the cottage of one of our out- 

4 Literally, by the "Third Section," i. e., of the Emperor's Per- 
sonal Chancellery, with jurisdiction over the gendarmerie, political 
exile, sectarians, etc.; abolished in 1880. 

249 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

door men, and was en villegiature there with his in- 
tended wife Ada and her mother. 

"Come in some day and have a cup of tea," he 
said to me; "I 'm rather bored. We '11 have a chat; 
I '11 tell you all about myself. And, by the way, you 
might do me a service. I 'm going to be married in 
a few days, and I have n't a best man. I hope you 
won't refuse to do me that pleasure." 

The proposal was a seductive one and I agreed to 
it. 

In a few days Mr. S n had made himself so 

charming to me that we became great friends, and I 
visited him every day and often spent hours with 
him. 

The day of the wedding I got leave from home for 
the whole day, put on a clean jacket and was very 
proud of my function as best man. When we got 
back from the church, I dined with the happy pair 
and we drank their health in infused vodka.^ 

When my mother saw how pleased I was with 
my new friend, she took alarm and restrained my 

devotion. One of her arguments against S ^n 

was that a well-mannered man who invited a 
boy to his house w^as bound by the rules of polite- 
ness first of all to make the acquaintance of his par- 
ents. 

^Nalivka, that is, vodka Infused with soaked fruits, like cherry 
brandy. 

250 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"I can't let my son visit a man whom I don't know 
at all." 

I told S n, and he called on my mother the 

same day and apologized for not having come before. 
After this he came to know my father and paid us 
frequent visits. Everybody got used to him and 
treated him frankly and familiarly as a friend of the 
family. At times he joined my father in his out- 
door work and he seemed entirely to share his convic- 
tions. 

In the autumn, when he was leaving Yasnaya 
Polyana, he called on my father and made a clean 
breast of his misdeeds. He confessed that he was a 
spy, sent by the secret police to keep an eye on my 
father and the visitors to the house. 

Another man who appeared at Yasnaya Polyana 
a good deal later and played the same part as 
S n, was the prison chaplain from Tula who vis- 
ited us periodically to have religious discussions with 
my father. By the assumed Liberalism of his con- 
versation he drew my father out to be explicit about 
his views, and pretended to be deeply interested in 
them. 

"What a queer man he is," said my father, with 
some astonishment, "and he seems to be sincere. I 
asked if the ecclesiastical authorities would not fall 
foul of him for coming to see me so often; but he 
does n't care a continental whether they do or don't. 

251 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

I began to think that he must have been sent to spy 
on me and told him what I suspected, but he assures 
me that he comes quite of his own accord." 

When my father was excommunicated it was this 
very priest that the Synod cited as having tried in 
vain to "bring him to a right way of thinking" by 
their orders. 

The last time he came to see my father was after 
his excommunication, during one of his illnesses. 
He was told that my father was ill and could not see 
him. This was in the summer. The priest sat down 
on the verandah and refused to go until he had seen 
Lyof Nikolayevitch personally. An hour or two 
passed, and still he remained obstinately seated there, 
waiting. He had to be spoken to extremely sharply 
and told to go. After that I never saw him again. 



252 




AT THE POKROF HOSPITAL 




TOLSTOY AMONG THE PEASANT CHILDREN 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE END OF THE SEVENTIES. THE GREAT CHANGE. 
THE MAIN ROAD. 

TRACING my reminiscences forward step by 
step, I have imperceptibly reached the eight- 
ies, and, in doing so, passed on to the time of 
my first manhood. In real life the transition was 
still more imperceptible. I remember that I did not 
realize it until it was already an accomplished fact. 
I regretted my lost childhood and wept bitterly. 

In proportion as my childhood had been sunny and 
cloudless, my early manhood was dark and gloomy. 
Is this the common lot, or does this period differ with 
different people? I do not know. 

I believe that I was unconsciously affected by my 
father's doubts and distresses, which had begun in 
1876, when I was ten years old. Like every child, I 
was interested in my father's and mother's private 
life only in so far as it affected me. It was about 
this time that my father's quest for a religion began. 
I will try, as well as I can, to tell all that has stuck 
in my memory from that period. 

Ever since I could remember, our family had been 
brought up on traditional lines, according to purely 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Orthodox Russian Church ideaSc Every evening 
before we went to bed we had to say a prayer for 
papa, mama, our brothers and sisters, and all Ortho- 
dox Christians. On the vigil of all the great Church 
festivals a priest used to come to our house and hold 
vespers, and the first and last weeks of Lent the 
whole household fasted. It was my mother who 
directed these matters; my father was pretty indif- 
ferent about religion, and did not always trouble to 
come to the zala when the priest was there. 

So it was in our early childhood. 

After that my father's attitude towards the Church 
began to change. I remember that short period of 
his life when he attended mass every Sunday and 
strictly observed all the fasts. From that time for- 
ward he talked more and more often about religion. 
Whoever visited us at Yasnaya Polyana, whether it 
was Ushakof, the Governor of the Province of Tula, 
Count Bobrinski the Radstockite,^ Strakhof, Fet, 
Rayevski, Pyotr Fyodorovitch Samarin, or Prince 

1 Count Bobrinski the Radstockite. The late Lord Radstock went 
to Russia in 1874 and had an immense success as an Evangelical 
missionary in the most unlikely of all missionary fields, the fashion- 
able drawing-rooms of St. Petersburg. His followers are generally 
known in Russia as Pashkovites, after Colonel Pashkof, his chief 
supporter. For some time the missionaries carried all before them, 
founded a Society and scattered tracts broadcast. Then the Gov- 
ernment took alarm, and the propaganda was driven from the 
capital into the country districts. Count and Countess Bobrinski 
were the most active Pashkovite propagandists in the Province of 
Tula. According to Mrs. Edward Trotter ("Undertones of the 

256 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Urusof, it was all the same: the conversation was 
sure to come round to religious subjects, and endless 
discussions arose, in which my father was often quite 
harsh and disagreeable. 

As my father grew more religious, so did we. In 
the earlier days we had fasted only in the first and 
last weeks of Lent, but from 1877 we took to observ- 
ing the whole of all the fasts and zealously attended 
all the church services. 

In the summer we prepared for communion during 
the Assumption Fast.^ I remember how we used 
to be taken to church on the outside-car, and what 
an exalted religious frame of mind we were all in: 
we called all our sins to mind, and solemnly prepared 
for confession. It was a rainy summer and there 
was a great crop of funguses. Along the highroad 
on the way to church there was an extraordinary 
number of mushrooms and we used to stop on the 
way home and fill our hats with them. 

That same summer Shtchegolenkof, the traveling 
minstrel,^ stayed with us at Yasnaya. He was 

19th Century," 1905) Count Bobrinski, while still a Minister of 
State, was converted by a casual conversation about Lord Radstock 
with a friend and went through a momentary experience resembling 
that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. In 1884 Colonel Pash- 
kof was turned out of Russia, and the overt operations of the 
Society were put an end to. 

2 August 1-15, old style, in honor of the Virgin Mary. It is the 
next strictest fast after Lent. 

3 Reciter or chanter of byltnas or old ballads of the heroic age, 
a profession frequently followed by blind beggars. 

257 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

called by his patronymic "Petrovitch." * He re- 
cited ballads something in the same style as the blind 
minstrels, but there was none of that offensive snuffle 
in his voice which I always found so repulsive in 
them. The chief picture I have of him in my mind 
is sitting on the stone steps of the verandah outside 
my father's study. When he recited, I used to enjoy 
sitting and gazing at his gray beard, which hung in 
twisted locks, and his endless stories delighted me. 
One tasted the flavor of hoary antiquity in them and 
felt the sound good sense of the people encrusted on 
them in the passage of the centuries. My father lis- 
tened to him with the greatest interest; he made him 
recite something new every day and Petrovitch was 
always able to satisfy his demands. He was inex- 
haustible. My father afterwards borrowed subjects 
from his stories for his tales for the people.^ 

At this distance of time it is not easy for me to 
unravel all my mental experiences of that date. 
I only remember the general impression, which 
amounted to feeling that my father had somehow 
changed and something was happening to him. That 
"something," which was beyond the comprehension 

4 By courtesy, distinguished and elderly people of the peasant 
class are addressed not by their Christian or surnames, but by the 
middle name, formed by adding -omtch or -ovna to their father's 
Christian name. 

5 "What Men Live By" and "The Three Old Men."— L T, 

258 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of a child, expressed itself in various ways and went 
on for several years, until about 1883. A good deal 
that happened then became clearer to me at a later 
date, but at the time, what I was chiefly sensible of 
was the change in my father's disposition, and as I 
had no notion of the acute moral crisis he was pass- 
ing through, I took very little interest in its real 
nature. 

In the spring of 1878, my father fasted and kept 
Lent strictly, and in the summer of the same year 
he visited the old monk Father Ambrose at the Opta 
Hermitage. I do not remember what he told us 
about this visit. I only know that he came back 
greatly dissatisfied and that soon afterwards he began 
to criticize the rites and traditions of the Church, and 
finally repudiated them altogether. 

At the same time, instead of going out riding or 
bathing or shooting or coursing, my father took more 
and more to going for walks on the highroad,^ where 
he picked up with all manner of tramps and pilgrims 
with whom he delighted in conversing. This high- 
road, which runs from Moscow to Kief passes less 
than a mile from the demesne of Yasnaya Polyana. 
In the old days, before the railway, this was the only 
means of communication between the north and 
south of Russia. The old post-boy Pavel Pentyakof 

®The chaussee, the cambered stone-road, as opposed to the ordi- 
nary flat earthen highways. 

259 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was still alive in my time, and I can remember his 
telling me how he drove the Emperor Alexander II 
along this road. 

When the railway was built the highroad lost con- 
siderably in importance, so far as vehicular traffic 
was concerned, but it still continued to be the favor- 
ite route for tramps,''^ and especially for pilgrims, 
with bast-wallets on their shoulders and long staffs 
in their hands, on their way to Kief, to the Trinity 
monastery, to the shrine of the Iberian Virgin, or the 
other holy places scattered along its length.^ 

"I 'm off to the Nevsky Prospect," my father used 
to say jokingly, as he took his staff and started out 
for his walk. When he got back for dinner, he 
would tell us all about the interesting people he had 
met, and his note-books of that date are full of vivid 
personal descriptions, sayings and proverbs, and 
especially of characteristic expressions of popular 
wisdom. 

Not having found satisfaction in the religion of 
the Church, my father set himself to seek for God 

■^ The English word "tramp" has not the same association as 
the Russian strannik, the wanderers on Russian roads not being 
so much a homeless population, drifting from the towns, as old 
peasants who have left their cottages from philosophical or reli- 
gious conviction. 

8 That is, to visit the Catacombs at Kief ; the shrine of the 
Iberian Virgin at the Resurrection Gate of China-Town in Moscow ; 
and that city of churches and monasteries known as the Trinity- 
Sergius Lavra, some 40 miles out from Moscow; all daily thronged 
with hosts of pilgrims. 

260 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in the beliefs of the common people, and in them he 
found the key which afterwards unlocked the door 
for him to the study and new interpretation of the 
Gospel. Once he had set out on this path, he gave 
himself up entirely to his new search and made a 
sudden and complete breach with his former life. 

In his "Confession," he says, with regard to this 
period of his life : "The life of our circle of society, 
the rich, the learned, not only repelled me but lost 
all meaning." And this renunciation of everything 
that had made our life what it was up to that time 
reacted most disagreeably on all the rest of us. As 
a boy of twelve, I felt that my father was getting 
more and more estranged from us, and that our inter- 
ests were not merely indifferent to him, but actually 
alien and repulsive. He got gloomy and irritable, 
often quarreled with my mother about trifles, and 
from our former jovial and high-spirited ring-leader 
and companion was transformed before our eyes into 
a stem and censorious propagandist. His harsh de- 
nunciations of the aimless life of gentlefolk, of their 
gluttony, their indolence, and spoliation of the indus- 
trious working-classes, grew more and more frequent. 

"Here we sit in our well-heated rooms, and this 
very day a man was found frozen to death on the 
highroad. 

"He was frozen to death because no one would 
give him a night's lodging. 

261 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"We stuff ourselves with cutlets and pastry of 
every sort, while in Samara the people are dying 
by thousands with swollen stomachs from famine. 

"We go riding and driving to the bathing-place, 
while Prokofi's last gelding lies dead and he has no 
beast to plow his strips with. 

"We are still snoring in bed, while the tailor has 
had time to walk into Tula and back to get hooks and 
eyes for our fur jackets." 

I will not say that when my father spoke so simply 
we children did not understand what he said. Of 
course we understood. But it spoiled our selfish 
childish happiness and broke up all our daily life. 
When we were getting up theatricals at Yasnaya and 
the two Baroness Mengdens came, and Nunya Novo- 
siltsef and the Kislenskis, and we were all enjoying 
ourselves with games and croquet and talking about 
falling in love, suddenly my father would come in 
and with a single word or, even worse, with a single 
look, would spoil the whole thing. And we would 
feel bored and, as it were, rather ashamed at times: 
"It would have been better if he had n't come." 
And the worst of it was that he felt this himself. 
He did not want to spoil our fun — for after all he 
was very fond of us — ^but nevertheless he did spoil it. 
He said nothing, but he thought something. We 
all knew what he thought, and that was what made 
us so uncomfortable. 

262 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Meanwhile our family life continued to flow along 
its accustomed channels, and to follow the lines of its 
normal development. We still had the same Nikolai 
the cook, the same "Anke Pie," transplanted from 
the Behrs family and deeply rooted in the life of 
Yasnaya Polyana, the same tutors and governesses, 
the same lessons, the same succession of babies that 
my mother nursed at her breast; all the founda- 
tions on which the life of our ant-heap rested were as 
unshaken as ever and as necessary for our selfish 
enjoyment. It is true that we felt an irreconcilable 
division in our lives, we felt that the chief thing 
had somehow gone out of them, because my father 
grew more and more remote from us ; it was often ex- 
tremely painful ; but we could not alter our lives as 
he wished us to; it seemed absolutely out of the ques- 
tion. 

The conflict of ideas with traditions, of "life 
according to God" with "Anke Pie" resulted as such 
conflicts in human life always do; tradition got the 
better of it, and the ideas achieved nothing beyond 
spoiling the flavor of our pie with their bitterness. 
What hope was there of reconciling "life according 
to God," the life of pilgrims and peasants, in which 
my father delighted, with those infallible principles 
which had been instilled into us from our cradle up : 
with the invariable duty of taking soup and cutlets 
at dinner, of talking French and English, of prepar- 

265 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ing for the Gymnase and the University, of learning 
one's part for theatricals'? And we children often 
felt that it was not we who failed to understand our 
father, but on the contrary, it was he who had ceased 
to understand us, because he was occupied with "some 
notions of his own." 

These "notions" were his new philosophy and the 
piles of books which grew up in his study. He got 
whole mountains of religious works from somewhere, 
lives of the Saints, Canons, and Homilies of the 
Fathers of the Church, and spent days together, shut 
up in his study, reading them and meditating. He 
would come out to dinner gloomy and thoughtful, 
and when he talked it was always about these "no- 
tions of his own," and we all found him tiresome 
and uninteresting. 

When I recall this period, I am filled with horror 
at the thought of what he must have been suffering 
mentally. When he utterly repudiated everything 
he had delighted in before, repudiated that patri- 
archal order of country-house life which he had lately 
described in his novels with such affection and which 
he had built up for himself, repudiated all his former 
interests, from war down to literary fame, family 
life and religion — ^how terribly his solitude must 
have weighed upon him ! All the more terribly be- 
cause it was the solitude of a man in the midst of a 
crowd of people with whom he had nothing in com- 

266 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

mon. Having started with repudiation and not yet 
having found those positive principles of love with 
which the study of the Gospels afterwards provided 
him and which were the foundation of all his philoso- 
phy of life, he wore himself out with anguish, like 
a man condemned to death, and for two years strug- 
gled with the temptation to suicide. "At that time, 
for all my 'happiness,' I used to hide ropes from my- 
self, so as not to hang myself on the cross-beam be- 
tween the bookshelves in my room, where I was alone 
every night when I undressed, and gave up going 
out with a gun, in order not to be tempted by too 
easy a means of ridding myself of the burden of 
existence." ^ 

But we did not understand him. 

And when, to relieve the intolerable oppression of 
the thoughts that tormented him, he tried to pour 
them out before us, we drew timidly away from him, 
in order not to have our childish, selfish happiness 
spoilt. 

It is true that at times he entered into our life, 
interested himself in our lessons, and tried to adapt 
himself to our understanding, but we felt that the 
interest was strained and artificial, not a father's 
interest but a teacher's. And he was conscious of 
this himself. 

^ ''Confession," published by Elpidin, Geneva. — I. T. 

267 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

In one of his letters to V. I. Alekseyef/^ written 
in 1882, describing the life of the family he says: 
"Seryozha is hard at work and believes in the Uni- 
versity. Tanya, half-good, half-serious and half- 
clever, becomes no worse, perhaps improves a little. 
Ilyusha grows and does no work; his spirit is not yet 
crushed however by organic processes. Lyolya and 
Masha, I think, are better than the rest; they have not 
caught my bad manners as the elder children have, 
and they seem to be developing under more favorable 
conditions. . . ." 

I have quoted this letter, with its touching self- 
condemnation, in order to show how discerning and 
conscientious my father was about our education, and 
how bitterly he must have felt the periods of 
estrangement, when his inward struggles so dis- 
tracted him from his family that he could not bring 
himself to treat us as he wished. 

10 A former tutor at Yasnaya Polyana. 



268 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE MOVE TO MOSCOW. SYNTAYEF. THE CENSUS. 
FYODOROF. SOLOVYOF. 

IN the autumn of 1881 the whole family settled 
in Moscow. 
This move, which was the logical outcome of 
all our preceding life, appeared to be necessary for 
the three following chief reasons : 

My eldest brother Sergei was at the University 
and it was out of the question to let him live in 
Moscow without somebody to look after him. 

It was time for my sister Tanya to "come out." 
She could not be left to run wild in the country with- 
out any decent society. 

It was far easier to educate the rest of the family, 
if my father was not going to help, in Moscow than 
at Yasnaya. 

In the summer my mother went into Moscow, a 
flat was rented in Money Lane ^ and in the autumn 
we moved. 

In the spring of that year I had been to Tula and 
passed the examination qualifying for promotion 

iDenezhny Pereulok. 

269 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

from the Fourth into the Fifth Form, and it was in- 
tended that I should go to a State Gymnase. My 
father called on the head of one of the Moscow 
Classical Gymnases to enter my name, but an unex- 
pected difficulty arose : among the papers required by 
the rules for my entry my father was asked to sign 
one guaranteeing my loyalty to the Tsar.^ 

He refused to sign it, and I had to go to Poliva- 
nof 's private Gymnase instead, where I was accepted 
on the strength of the examination, but without any 
unnecessary formalities. 

"How can I guarantee the conduct of another 
human being, even my own son's?" said my father 
indignantly. "I told the Warden that it was absurd 
to ask parents to sign such papers, and he agreed 
that it was an unnecessary formality, but it appears 
after all that they cannot take a boy without it." 

When we moved into Moscow we all fell under 
the influence of the new sensations of town life. 
Each of us was differently affected according to his 
or her disposition. My mother threw herself 
energetically into the arrangement of the flat and 
the purchase of furniture, and under Uncle Kostya's 
guidance called on all the people that she ought to 
cultivate and saw to Tanya's having parties to go to. 
Seryozha was wrapped up in the life of the Uni- 

2 Blagonadyozhnost, literally "trustworthiness," has this narrower 
specific meaning in official documents. 

270 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

versity; while I, in the intervals between going to 
school and preparing my lessons, played knuckle- 
bones with the children in the street, and by the 
spring had already fallen in love with a schoolgirl 
whom my people did not know. 

That winter my father made friends with Syntayef 
the sectarian, who greatly interested him and had 
an undoubted influence on his views. He was a 
simple peasant-proprietor of Tula Province, a stone- 
mason by trade. My father had already heard of 
him from Prugavin^ in the Samara days and went 
over to his village to see him. 

Syntayef came to Moscow afterwards, in the win- 
ter, and stayed for some time with us in Money Lane. 
At first glance he produced the impression of the most 
ordinary sort of impoverished muzhik; he had a thin, 
mud-colored beard, tinged with gray, a greasy black 
sheepskin jacket, which he wore both indoors and out 
of doors, big colorless eyes and the typical Northern 
pronunciation of o} 

Like every self-respecting muzhik he knew how to 
behave himself with simple dignity, and betrayed no 
shyness when he found himself in good society; and 
when he spoke one felt that what he said was the 

^Prugavln: a man Tolstoy met in Samara, who was studying 
the varieties of religious belief among the Samara peasants. 

* That is to say, that he pronounced unaccented o's as o's. In 
Moscow and the southern half of Russia unaccented o is pronounced 
like a. 

271 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

result of careful reflection and that it would be im- 
possible to shake his convictions. 

Syntayef agreed with my father in many respects. 
Like my father, Syntayef rejected the Church and all 
ritual observances and, like him again, preached 
brotherhood, love, and "life according to God." 
"Everything is within you," he used to say: "where 
love is, there is God." Being a simple man and not 
understanding compromises, Syntayef rejected all 
violence and would not allow it even as a means of 
resisting evil. He refused to pay taxes on principle, 
because they go to maintain the army. And when 
the police distrained on his property and sold his cat- 
tle, he looked on at his own ruin without a murmur 
and offered no opposition. "It 's their sin ; let them 
do it. I will not open the gates for them, but if they 
must, let them go in; I have no locks," he said, when 
he told the tale. 

His family shared his convictions and had all 
things in common, not recognizing private property. 
When his son was called on to serve in the army he 
refused to take the oath because the Gospel says 
"Swear not," and refused to handle a rifle because it 
"smelt of blood." For this he was sent to the 
Schliisselburg Disciplinary Battalion and suffered 
great privations. 

Syntayef saw the realization of his ideal of "life 
according to God" in the early Christian community 

272 




r= o 



^ -d 









REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of goods. "Fields ought not to be divided, forests 
ought not to be divided. Then we should need no 
locks, no trade, no ships, no war. . . . Every one 
would be of one heart and one mind; there would be 
no yours and no mine; everything would belong to 
the town or village," he said, and in his words one 
could feel a profound belief in the attainability of 
these ideals, which he got from the Gospel. 

My father was so much interested in his doctrines 
that he often invited people to meet Syntayef and 
made him expound his views to them. 

It is not to be wondered at that the appearance of 
a man like this in Moscow, and especially in Tol- 
stoy's house, excited the attention of the authorities. 
Prince Dolgoruki, the Governor-General, sent a 
smart Captain of Gendarmes to my father with 
orders to enquire what Syntayef was doing in his 
house, what his opinions were and how long he was 
going to stay in Moscow. I shall never forget how 
my father received this Gendarme in his study, be- 
cause I never imagined that he was capable of losing 
his temper to such an extent. He did not shake 
hands with him or ask him to sit down, but talked to 
him standing. When he heard what he had come 
about he answered curtly that he did not consider 
himself obliged to answer such questions. When 
the Captain endeavored to reply, my father turned as 
white as a sheet and pointing to the door, said in 

275 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

quivering tones : "Leave the house ! For Heaven's 
sake, leave the house ! ... At once ! . . . I beg you 
leave the house !" he shouted at last, throwing off all 
restraint and hardly giving the bewildered Gendarme 
time to go out, he slammed the door after him with 
all his might. 

He was sorry for his outburst afterwards, he re- 
gretted that he had lost his temper and had been rude 
to any one; but all the same, when the Governor- 
General persisted, and a few days later sent his own 
chief secretary Istomin on the same errand, he re- 
fused to answer his questions and merely said that if 
Vladimir Andreyevitch wanted to see him, there was 
nothing to prevent him from coming himself. I do 
not know how this friction with the authorities would 
have ended if Syntayef had not gone away soon 
afterwards. 

• ••••••• 

That same year my father took part in the three- 
days census of Moscow. He selected the poorest 
quarter of the city, near the Smolensk Market, in- 
cluding Prototchny Lane and the then famous night- 
shelters, the "Rzhanof Fortress" and others. 

We went about of an evening through all the 
rooms, amid horrible smells and dirt, and my father 
questioned each of the lodgers as to what he lived on, 
what brought him there, how much he paid, and what 
he had to eat. In the general room, where they 

276 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

were let in to sleep free, it was still worse. There 
was no need to ask questions there, because it was 
evident that they were all people who had sunk to the 
lowest depths, and the mass of poverty and degrada- 
tion one beheld excited nothing but horror and dis- 
gust. 

I looked at my father's face and saw written on it 
all that I felt myself, but in addition it wore a 
look of suffering and repressed inward struggle ; this 
look made a deep impression on me which I have 
never forgotten. I felt that he wanted to run away 
as fast as he could, just as I did, but I also felt that 
the reason he could not do so was because there was 
nowhere to run to ; wherever he went the impression 
of what he had seen would remain with him and con- 
tinue to torment him just the same, or even more. 
And this was indeed the fact. 

This is how he describes what he felt in his 
pamphlet "Then What Must We Do^' (1886): 

Town life, which had always been strange and unnat- 
ural to me, became so repulsive that all the pleasures of 
luxury which had seemed pleasures to me before became a 
torment. And search as I might in my heart for any justifi- 
cation of our life, however small, I could not look at our 
own or anybody else's drawing-room, or a clean well-spread 
dining-table, or a carriage with well-fed coachman and 
horses, or shops, or theaters, or parties, without a feeling of 
profound irritation. I could not help seeing side by side 
with it the cold, hungry, degraded inhabitants of Lyapin 

277 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

HousCc And I could not rid myself of the idea that those 
two things were connected and that the one was the result 
of the other. I remember that, as this guilty feeling had 
presented itself to my mind at the first moment, so it con- 
tinued with me. 



That same winter my father made the acquaint- 
ance of two interesting people in Moscow with whom 
he became very intimate, namely Vladimir Fyodoro- 
vitch Orlof and Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorof. 

The former I do not remember very much of; but 
Fyodorof, former Librarian of the Moscow Rum- 
yantsef Museum, I can see before my eyes at this 
minute, as if he were alive. He was a little lean old 
man of middle height, always badly dressed, and 
extraordinarily quiet and retiring. Round his neck, 
instead of a collar, he wore a sort of gray check com- 
forter, and winter and summer he always had on the 
same old short overcoat. His face had an expres- 
sion that one can never forget. He had the liveliest 
intelligent, penetrating eyes, and was at the same 
time all alight with inward goodness, amounting to 
childish naivete. If there are such things as saints 
they must be just like him. 

Nikolai Fyodorovitch was not only constitution- 
ally incapable of doing harm to any one ; I think he 
was himself entirely proof against being harmed by 
other people's ill-will, because he simply did not un- 

278 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

derstand it. He was said to live in a garret, like a 
real ascetic, sleeping on the bare boards, living on 
scraps, and giving all his money away to the poor. 
As far as I remember he never argued with my father, 
and what was still more remarkable, my father, who 
was always vehement and impetuous in conversation, 
used to listen to Nikolai Fyodorovitch with a most 
attentive air, and never lost his temper with him. 

But it was a very different case with Vladimir 
Solovyof.^ At one time he used to visit my father 
pretty often, and I cannot remember any occasion 
when their meetings ended without the most des- 
perate disputes. Every time they met they made up 
their minds not to lose their tempers, and it always 
ended in the same way. We would have a party of 
visitors taking tea in the evening, there would be gay 
and lively conversation, Solovyof cracking jokes, 
everybody in good spirits; when suddenly and unex- 
pectedly some abstract question would arise; my 
father would begin an argument, invariably directed, 
for some reason, at Solovyof; Solovyof would an- 
swer back, one word led to another, until in the 
end both jumped up from their seats and a long and 
furious discussion ensued. Solovyof's tall thin 
figure with the beautiful waving locks swung to and 

5 A well-known philosopher and writer on public affairs. Son 
of the famous historian; born 1853. An idealist and hermit, he 
died of overwork and self-neglect in 1900. 

279 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

fro like a pendulum about the room; my father got 
excited, they raised their voices, and till the end of 
the evening it was impossible to get them apart. 

When the party broke up, my father would go out 
into the hall to see the visitors off; and as he said 
good-by to Solovyof, would hold his hand in his, 
look him in the eyes with a guilty smile, and ask 
him to forgive him for getting so heated. And so 
it was every time. 

Solovyof as a thinker never meant very much to 
my father, and he soon lost all interest in him. My 
father looked on him merely as a "brainy" man, and 
called him a "dean's son." 

"There are many such," he said. "A 'dean's 
son' is a man who lives exclusively on what he can 
get from books. He reads masses of books and 
makes inferences from what he has read. But he is 
entirely wanting in the most important thing of all 
— what he brings to them himself. There are plenty 
of clever people among the 'dean's sons' — like 
Strakhof for instance; he was a very clever man 
indeed, and if he had thought things out in his own 
head he would have been a great man ; but that was 
where his misfortune lay, that he was a 'dean's 
son', too." 

I heard my father give this definition many years 
after the death of both the people he mentioned. 



280 



CHAPTER XIX 

MANUAL LABOR. BOOT-MAKING. HAY-MAKING. 

IN 1881 my father wrote to our former tutor 
V. I. Alexeyef : 'T am now convinced that the 
only means to show the way is by life itself, the 
example of life. The influence of example is very 
slow, very indefinite — in the sense that I do not see 
how you can tell whom it influences — and very diffi- 
cult. But it is the only thing that gives the neces- 
sary impulse. 

"The proof -by-example of the possibility of a 
Christian life, that is of a reasonable and happy life 
under all possible circumstances, is the one thing that 
can affect people, and the one thing that you and I 
must achieve; so let us help each other to achieve it." 

"The example of life," "a reasonable and happy 
life under all possible circumstances": this was 
the only possible solution of the complicated ques- 
tions which beset my father at that time, and this was 
the line along which he directed his own conduct till 
the fatal autumn of 1910. 

In spite of the immense mental labor which swal- 
lowed up all his energies, my father numbered him- 

281 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

self among t±ie idlers and parasites who live on the 
back of the working-classes, and in order to justify 
in his own eyes, to some extent at any rate, what he 
called his indolence, he took to manual labor, and 
from that time forth he never gave it up again till he 
was too weak to labor any more. 

In a letter to N. N. Gay, of July, 1892, he says: 
"You cannot imagine how disgusted, ashamed, and 
melancholy I feel, now they are getting in the har- 
vest, to be living in the vile and abominable con- 
ditions in which I do. Especially when I think of 
former years." 

My father was always fond of manual labor as a 
useful and healthy form of exercise, and as a means 
of communion with Nature. But his idea of labor 
as a religious duty became especially marked from 
the beginning of the eighties. I remember how the 
first winter of our life in Moscow he used to go 
out beyond the Moscow River, somewhere in the 
Sparrow Hills, and saw wood with the muzhiks. He 
used to come home tired out, covered with sweat, and 
full of new impressions of the healthy life of labor, 
and tell us at dinner about how the sawyers worked, 
how long a spell they did at a time and how much 
they got for it; and of course he always contrasted 
their laborious life and their poverty with our luxury 
and aristocratic idleness. 

In order to be able to work at home and turn the 
282 




CORN GROWN AT YASNAYA POLYANA 




HAKVhSilNu Ai VASNAYA POL\AiNA 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

long winter evenings to account, he began to learn 
bootmaking. He got a bootmaker from somewhere 
— a modest black-bearded man, a typical serious 
working-man — ^bought a set of implements and 
materials, and set up a bench in the little room that 
he had next to his study. In the window, beside the 
bench, a curious little iron stove, heated by a kero- 
sene lamp, was pint up, for the double purpose of 
warming the room and ventilating it. I remember 
that in spite of this stove, of which he was extremely 
proud, it was always very stuffy in his tiny low- 
roofed workshop and smelt of leather and to- 
bacco. 

The shoemaker used to come at fixed hours; master 
and pupil sat side by side on low stools and set to 
work, splicing bristles, closing, hammering the backs 
into shape, pinning the out-soles, building up the 
heel-lifts, and so on.^ My father, who was always 
enthusiastic and thorough, insisted on doing every- 
thing himself, and never gave in until he had suc- 
ceeded in making his work just like his teacher's. 
He sat huddled up over his bench, carefully waxing 
his thread, or splicing his bristle, breaking it, start- 
ing afresh, groaning with the effort, and, pupil-like, 
triumphant at every success. 

iThe bristles are used in bootmaking as needles to pass through 
crooked holes: they are split at the thick end and spliced with the 
ends of the waxed thread. "Closing" is sewing the seams of the 
"upper," joining the "quarter" to the "vamp" or "golosh." 

285 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Allow me, Lyof Nikolayevitch, I '11 do it," the 
shoemaker would say, seeing my father's unavailing 
efforts. 

"No, no, I '11 do it myself. You do your work, 
and I'll do mine; it's the only way to learn." 

During the lessons people often came to see my 
father, and sometimes there was such a crowd of in- 
terested spectators that there was no room to turn 
round. I was fond of being with him too, and often 
spent whole evenings there. 

I remember how Prince Obolenski, my cousin 
Elizaveta Valerianovna's husband, came in one day. 
My father had just learnt how to drive the pins into 
the sole. He was sitting, holding a boot upside 
down between his knees and diligently hammering 
wooden pegs into the new red sole. Some of them 
went wrong, but most of them were driven in suc- 
cessfully. 

"Look, is n't that grand?" said my father, exult- 
antly, holding out his work for the visitor to see. 

"It does n't seem so very difficult," said Obolenski, 
half in joke. 

"Well, you try!" 

"Right you are !" 

"Very good; but on one condition; every peg you 
drive in I '11 pay you a rouble, and every one you 
break you '11 pay me ten copecks.^ Agreed?" 

2 There are loo copecks or farthings to a rouble. 

286 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Obolenski took the boot, awl, and hammer, and 
broke eight pegs one after the other; then he laughed 
with his good-humored laugh and amid general hilar- 
ity paid up eighty copecks which went to the shoe- 
maker. 

I remember another occasion, connected with my 
only reminiscence of the poet Polonski. We were 
sitting at the bench working one night — I say 'we,' 
because I also learnt the business, and was not at all 
a bad hand at bootmaking at one time — when the 
footman, Sergei Petrovitch, came and said that a Mr. 
Potogonski would like to see the Count. 

"Who on earth is Potogonski? I don't know any 
one of the name. Show him up," said my father. 

At least five minutes elapsed. We had already 
forgotten about Potogonski, when suddenly we heard 
what sounded like strange uneven wooden footsteps 
in the passage. The door opened and a tall gray- 
headed man on crutches appeared. Looking up at 
the visitor and recognizing him at once, my father 
jumped up and kissed him. 

"Good Heavens ! So it 's you, Yakof Petrovitch ! 
For Heaven's sake forgive me for having made you 
come up all these stairs. If I had known I would 
have come down, but Sergei said 'Potogonski.' I 
never imagined for a moment it could be you. What 
will you take?" 

"Well, under the circumstances, I '11 take a pot o' 
287 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

potogonnoye; ^ I should enjoy a little tea," laughed 
Polonski, panting from his exertions and seating him- 
self on the sofa. 

As a matter of fact, in order to get to my father's 
study, the poor lame old gentleman had to climb up 
two flights of stairs, go through the zala^ down some 
very steep steps, and then along a dimly lighted pas- 
sage full of steps and comers. Neither before nor 
after that occasion did I ever see Polonski, and I 
remember very little about this visit ; for some reason 
or other I soon left the room and was not present 
during his conversation with my father. 

My father's other instructor in shoemaking was 
our own man Pavel Arbuzof, son of Marya Afanas- 
yevna the nurse, and brother of Sergei the footman. 
My father worked with him one time at Yasnaya 
Polyana. 

In the summer my father worked in the fields. If 
he heard of the poverty and distress of any widow or 
sick old man,^ he would undertake to work on their 
behalf and plowed, reaped and carried their com 
for them. 

When he first began, he was entirely alone in these 
occupations; no one took any interest in them and 
most of the family looked on his field-work as a 

3 Potogonnoye means "sudorific." 

4 That is, heads of households unable to take advantage of their 
share in the communal fields of the village. 

288 




PACKING APPLES ON TOLSTOY's ESTATE 




SORTING THE FRUIT 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

whim, and felt rather sorry that he should waste his 
valuable energies on such heavy and unproductive 
labor. Although my father had become much gent- 
ler by this time, lost his temper less in argument, was 
less prone to find fault with others, and was some- 
times gay and sociable as he used to be in the old 
days, still we all felt the harshness of the discord 
between our life, with its croquet and visitors and 
endless round of amusements, and my father's, with 
its successive spells of strenuous work, in his study 
and in the fields, at his writing-table and at the plow- 
tail. 

The first member of the family who allied herself 
with my father was my sister Masha, who is now 
dead.^ 

In 1885 she was fifteen years old. She was a thin, 
fair girl, lissom and rather tall, resembling my 
mother in figure, but taking more after my father 
in features, with the same strongly marked cheek- 
bones and with bright blue eyes. Quiet and retiring 
in disposition, she always had a certain air of being, 
as it were, rather "put upon." She felt for my 
father's solitude, and was the first of the whole fam- 
ily to draw away from the society of those of her 
own age and unobtrusively but firmly and definitely 
go over to my father's side. 

Always a champion of the downtrodden and un- 

^ She married Prince N. L. Obolenski in 1897 and died in 1906. 

291 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

fortunate, Masha threw herself whole-heartedly into 
the interests of the poor of the village and, whenever 
she could, helped them with such little physical 
strength as she had, and above all with her great 
responsive heart. There were no doctors about the 
house as yet at that time, and all the sick people of 
Yasnaya Polyana, and often of the neighboring vil- 
lages, came to Masha for assistance.^ 

She often used to go about from house to house 
visiting her patients, and the peasants of our village 
remember her with lively gratitude, while the women 
are still firmly convinced that Marya Lvovna 
''knew," and could always tell without fail whether 
a patient would recover or not. 

That same summer a young Jew named F. ap- 
peared at Yasnaya Polyana; at that time he was a 
sincere disciple of my father's, a disinterested and 
convinced idealist. He lived in the village and 
worked for the peasants, without demanding any 
payment for his work beyond the simplest and most 
Spartan fare, and he dreamed of founding a society 
with community of goods like the early Christians. 
In order to avoid trouble with the authorities he had 
himself christened into the Russian Church. 

At one time F. was carried away to such an extent 

6 After Tolstoy's illness in the Crimea a doctor always lived in 
the house: Tolstoy stipulated that if a doctor were kept for him 
he must also attend the muzhiks of the neighborhood. — Maude's 
"life of Tolstoy." 

292 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

by Christian ideas, that he astonished every one by 
his thoroughgoingness, and had a certain influence 
even among the villagers, especially among the 
younger ones. He had a wife, a pretty Jewess called 
Rebecca, and a baby, and they lived in a cottage and 
literally starved. F. used to bring them the crusts 
of bread that he got for his labor, and very often, 
when he worked for very poor peasants, he got noth- 
ing at all and went hungry too. Rebecca went about 
the village and sometimes about our demesne, dressed 
in rags, and got food for herself and her little boy 
wherever she could by begging. At last she insisted 
on her husband demanding at least a pipkin of milk 
every day for the child in return for his work. But 
he did not think it right even to do that, and it ended 
in his wife, who could no longer bear such an exist- 
ence, leaving him and going away. 

One evening F. came in to see my father and asked 
him to read something aloud to him. While my 
father was reading F. suddenly turned pale and fell 
fainting on the floor. It appeared that he had been 
working all day without having anything to eat, and 
had fainted from hunger. This event had an over- 
whelming effect on my father, and he could never 
forget it. "We well-fed people stuff ourselves and 
do no work, while this man has been working the 
whole day and fainted from sheer hunger." What a 
vivid and terrible contrast! 

293 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Another time, in the autumn, a passing Gipsy got 
F. to give him his only tunic, and when winter ap- 
proached, F. had absolutely nothing to wear but a 
hempen shirt. Of course there was a great deal of 
talk about it; it ended in people taking pity on 
him, and by the winter-time he was fitted out with a 
better wardrobe than he had when he came. 

I arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, after my examina- 
tion, at the beginning of June that year, when all the 
family was assembled at home, and our summer life 
was following its customary beaten track. I was 
nineteen years old, looked on myself as already en- 
gaged to my present wife, and dreamed of getting 
married and beginning a new life with her, in accord- 
ance with my father's views. I did not know what 
to do with my superfluous energy and went and told 
my father that I wanted to do some outdoor work, 
and asked him to tell me what to do. 

"Good! I will. Go to Zharova's; her husband 
left her last winter to go and earn money in town and 
has not come back again; she has a struggle to get 
along, with her children on her hands, and has no 
one to plow her strips for her. Get a wooden 
plow,"^ harness Mordvin and go and plow for 
her; it's just the moment for turning over the 
fallow." 

"^ Sokhd, the short-tailed, shafted, wooden plow used by the peas- 
ants; light enough to be swung up on the side of a horse when 
going to and returning from the fields. 

294 




VILLAGE NEAR YASNAYA FOLYANA 




HAY-MAKING ON TOLSTOY S ESTATE 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

I did as he told me, and soon had several strips at 
the back of the village, near the lake, plowed up. 
I well remember the sensation of doing useful work, 
which was new to me, and how pleasant and tranquil- 
izing it was. You feel like a horse harnessed to the 
plow you are following, turning up furrow after 
furrow; you think your leisurely thoughts, you keep 
watching the shining ribbon of earth, the endless 
band sliding off the mold-board, the fat white cock- 
chafer grubs wriggling helplessly in the fresh furrow, 
the rooks which follow the track of the plow, without 
paying you the slightest attention, picking up what 
they can find ; and you never notice you are tired till 
dinner-time comes, or the twilight drives you home 
again. Then you turn your plow upside down, tie it 
up to the carriers, get up sideways on your horse and 
ride home, with your legs jogging against the shafts, 
meditating pleasantly on the coming food and 
rest. 

Very often, when I had taken my horse back to the 
stable, without waiting for the family meal, I would 
run straight into the outdoor servants' hall, where 
they were dining on the bare table, seat myself in a 
corner between a coachman and a laundress, and sup 
up cold quass with pounded onion and potatoes, or 
heavily salted watery crumb-broth ^ with a dash of 
green oil, in a round wooden spoon. 

^ Murtsovka, black bread crumbled in quass or water. 

297 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

By St. Peter's Day ^ we had begun to mow the hay. 
As a rule the Yasnaya peasants got in the hay from 
our fields for payment in kind, on a sharing arrange- 
ment. Before the hay-making began they used to 
form themselves into gangs ^^ of several families 
apiece, and each gang had its own pieces to mow and 
carry, at the rate of a third share of the hay, or two- 
fifths, for payment, according to the quality of the 
grass. 

Our gang consisted of two peasants, — the tall 
Vasili Mikheyef and the long-nosed dwarfish Osip 
Makarof — my father, F. the Jew, and myself. We 
undertook to mow the new garden beyond the ave- 
nues, and the water-meadow by the Voronka. I 
mowed for the benefit of Zharova again, and my 
father and F. for some one else. 

It was a very hot summer and we had to get the 
hay carried quickly, because the rye ^^ would soon be 
ripe, and the peasants had no time to spare. The 
grass in the fields had been burnt up by the sun and 
was as dry and tough as wire. It was only very 
early in the morning when the dew was on it that it 

9 June 29th, i. e., July nth, new style. 

10 Artels. Whatever work they have in hand Russians always 
form themselves into disciplined gangs and work for common 
profit. In their more highly developed form, in the towns, the 
Artels are big organizations or Guilds for each trade, resembling 
our Trade Unions, except that they are organized for the common 
liability as well as the common advantage of the members. 

11 That is, the "winter rye," sown the previous autumn. 

298 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

lay at all lightly on the scythe, and we had to get 
up at dawn in order to get the task we had set our- 
selves overnight done in time. Our best mower, 
Vasili, went in front, then came Osip, my father, F., 
and myself. My father mowed well and never fell 
behind, though he sweated copiously and evidently 
got tired. For some reason or other, when he saw 
me at it, he declared that I mowed like a carpenter; 
there was something about me in the turn of the waist 
and the sweep of the scythe that suggested a car- 
penter to him. When the sun was high we tedded 
the hay and gathered it into cocks, and when the 
evening dew fell, went out again with our scythes 
and mowed till night. 

Following our example, another gang was formed 
like ours, a big and merry one this, which my brothers 
Sergei and Lyof joined, besides the governess's ^^ son, 
Alcide, a boy of the same age as myself, a capital 
fellow, whom the peasants knew as Aldakim Alda- 
kimovitch. 

My sister Masha was in our gang, while Tanya 
and my two cousins, Masha and Vera Kuzminski, 
were in the other. 

Our gang was very serious and solemn : theirs was 
frivolous and gay. On Sundays and holidays, and 
sometimes on ordinary working-days, the other gang 
sold their haycocks for drinks; they had endless songs 

i2Mrae. Seuron, the French lady. 

299 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and amusement; while we, "the saints," behaved our- 
selves with great gravity, and had, it must be con- 
fessed, rather a dull time of it. I must also confess 
that sometimes when they sold a cock my brother 
Lyof , who did not drink vodka, kept his share of it for 
me, and I enjoyed playing traitor to my gang every 
now and then and drinking his glass. This did not 
prevent me from looking down on their gang, all the 
more as their merry-making ended in disaster. The 
drunken muzhiks got fighting and Semyon Rezunof, 
the head of the gang, broke his father Sergei's arm. 

The summer I am telling about was remarkable 
for the fact that the passion for outdoor work infected 
every one staying in the house at Yasnaya Polyana. 
Even my mother used to come out to the hay-fields 
in a sarafan with a rake, and my uncle, an oldish man 
occupying a dignified official position at the time, 
mowed so vigorously that his hands were covered 
with huge blisters. Of course very few of those who 
worked shared my father's convictions or had any 
theoretical ideas about manual labor, but it so hap- 
pened that summer that the whole household went in 
for outdoor work and every one took an interest in it, 
some on its merits, and some merely as a pleasant 
and healthy form of athletics. 

We used to have periodical visits about that time 

from Mr. , one of my father's younger disciples. 

He came when field operations were in full swing. 

300 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

After breakfast the whole company collected and we 
all went to the stables where our tools were kept. I 
was just then helping my father to build a coach- 
house in the village for one of the villagers; F. the 
Jew was thatching somebody's cottage; while my 
sisters were busy binding rye-sheaves. Every one 
took the tools he needed; I and my father took saws 
and axes; ^^ F. took a pitchfork, my sisters took 
rakes, and we set out. 

Mr. was going with my father and me. My 

sister Tanya, who was always lively and fond of 

fun, seeing that Mr. was setting out with empty 

hands, turned to him, calling him by his Christian 
name and patronymic. 

"And where are you going, ?" 

"To the villa-a-age." 

"What for'?" 

"To he-e-elp." 

"Why, how are you going to help^ You have n't 
got any tools. Here, take a rake; it'll do to hand 
them up the straw." ^^ 

"Oh, I shall help them with advi-i-ice," said 

Mr. , speaking, as he always did, with a drawl 

like an Englishman, quite unaware of Tanya's irony, 
and how ridiculous and useless he would be with his 

13 Russian workmen use an axe for all sorts of work ; an axe 
serves them for bradawl, chisel, and hammer. 

1* The straw, i. e., for caulking the seams between the logs. 

301 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

advice in "the villa-a-age," where everybody has to 
work hard, and where people dressed up in baggy 
EngUsh knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets are 
merely in the way and interfere with other people's 
work. 

I record this incident with regret, as a character- 
istic sample of the type of the "Tolstoyites," of 
whom we hear so much. How many such "advisers" 
have I seen in my time ! How many of them turned 
up at Yasnaya Polyana ! And among them all how 
few really convinced and sincere believers! Many 
of them turned abruptly aside during my father's 
lifetime, while others still stalk vaingloriously in his 
shadow and only do harm to his memory. My father 
had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" 
were to him the most incomprehensible sect and the 
furthest removed from his way of thinking that he 
had ever come across. 

"I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and 
people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plow 
and reap and make boots ; while the chief thing that 
I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing 
I believe in, the most important of all, they will 
forget." 



302 



CHAPTER XX 

MY FATHER AS A FATHER 

AT this point I will turn back and try to trace 
the influence which my father had on my 
upbringing, and I will recall, as well as I 
can, the impressions that he left on my mind in my 
childhood, and later in the melancholy days of my 
early manhood, which happened to coincide with the 
radical change in his whole philosophy of life. 

I have already spoken of the "Anke Pie" which 
my mother brought to Yasnaya Polyana from the 
Behrs family. In making my mother bear all the 
responsibility for that "pie," I have done her an 
injustice; for my father, at the time of his marriage, 
had his own "Anke pie" too, though I dare say he 
had grown too used to it to notice it. His "pie" 
was that ancient tradition of life at Yasnaya Polyana 
which he found when he came into the world, and 
which he afterwards dreamed of restoring. 

In 1852, tired of life in the Caucasus and mindful 
of his old home at Yasnaya Polyana, he writes to 
his aunt, Tatyana Alexandrovna,^ describing "the 
happiness which awaits me." 

^T. A. Yergolskaya, a distant relative, who took the chief part 
in bringing him up after his mother's death. 

303 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

This is how I picture it to myself: After some years, 
I shall find myself, neither very young nor very old, back 
at Yasnaya Polyana again : my affairs will all be in order ; 
I shall have no anxieties for the future, and no troubles 
in the present. You also will be living at Yasnaya. You 
will be getting a little old, but you will still be healthy and 
vigorous. We shall lead the life we led in the old days: 
I shall work in the mornings, but we shall meet and see 
each other almost all day. 

We shall dine together in the evening. I shall read you 
something that interests you. Then we shall talk; I shall 
tell you about my life in the Caucasus; you will give me 
reminiscences of my father and mother; you will tell me 
some of those "terrible stories" to which we used to listen 
in the old days with frightened eyes and open mouths. 
We shall talk about the people that we loved and who 
are no more. You will cry, and I shall cry too; but oui 
tears will be refreshing, tranquilizing tears. We shall talk 
about my brothers who will visit us from time to time, and 
about dear Masha,^ who will also spend several months 
every year at Yasnaya, which she loves so, with all her 
children. We shall have no acquaintances; no one will 
come in to bore us with gossip. It is a wonderful dream. 
But that is not all that I let myself dream of. I shall be 
married. My wife will be gentle, kind, and affectionate ; 
she will love you as I do; we shall have children who 
will call you Granny; you will live in the big house, in 
the room on the top floor where my grandmother lived 
before.^ The whole house will be run on the same lines 

2 My father's sister.— I. T. The nun. 

siPelageya Nikolayevna, Nikolai Ilyitch's mother. — I. T. I. e., 
Tolstoy's father's mother. 

304 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

as it was in my father's time, and we shall begin the same 
life over again, but with a change of roles. You will take 
my grandmother's place, but you will be better still than 
she was ; I shall take my father's place, though I can never 
hope to be worthy of the honor. My wife will take my 
mother's place, and the children ours. Masha will fill the 
part of both my aunts,* except for their sorrow; and there 
will even be Gasha ^ there to take the place of Praskovya 
Ilymitchna. The only thing lacking will be some one to 
take the part you played in the life of our family. We 
shall never find such a noble and loving heart as yours. 
There is no one to succeed you. 

There will be three fresh faces that will appear among 
us from time to time, namely, my brothers; especially one 
who will often be with us, Nikolenka, who will be an old 
bachelor, bald, retired, always the same kindly noble fellow. 
I imagine him telling the children stories of his own 
composition, as of old; the children kissing his grubby 
hands, which will still be grubby, but worthy to be kissed 
nevertheless. I see him playing with them; my wife bus- 
tling about to prepare him his favorite dish; him and my- 
self going over our reminiscences of the old long-ago days ; 
you sitting in your accustomed place listening to us with 
interest. You will still call us by the old names of 
Lyovotchka and Nikolenka in spite of our age and you will 
scold me for eating my food with my fingers, and him for 
not having washed his hands. 

If I were made Emperor of Russia, if I were given Peru 
for my own, in short, if a fairy came with her wand and 

*Pelageya Ilyinitchna Yushkova and Alexandra Ilyinitchna 
Osten-Saken.— I. T. 

sAgafya Mikhailovna. — I. T. 

307 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

asked me what I wanted, I should lay my hand on my heart 
and answer that I wanted these dreams to become realities. 

Just ten years after this letter my father married 
and almost all his dreams were realized, exactly as 
he had designed. Only the big house with his grand- 
mother's room was missing, and his brother Niko- 
lenka with the dirty hands, for he died two years 
before, in i860. In his family life my father wit- 
nessed a repetition of the life of his parents, and in 
us children he sought to find a repetition of himself 
and his brothers. 



This was the atmosphere in which we were brought 
up and continued to live till the middle of the seven- 
ties. We were educated as regular "gentlefolk," 
proud of our social position and holding aloof from 
all the outer world. Everything that was not us was 
below us, and therefore unworthy of imitation. 

When our neighbor Alexander Nikolayevitch 
Bibikof and his son Nikolenka were asked to our 
Christmas tree, we used to take note of everything 
that Nikolenka did that was n't "the thing," and aft- 
wards used "Nikolenka Bibikof" as a term of abuse 
among ourselves, considering that there was nobody 
in the world so stupid and contemptible as he was. 
And we regarded Nikolenka in this light because we 
could see that papa regarded his father in the same 

308 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

way. Alexander Nikolayevitch was very respectful 
towards papa and would never think of coming to 
call without four horses to his carriage; while papa 
did not go in for such ceremony and used to go over 
to Telyatinka in an ordinary cart without a coach- 
man, or sometimes just on horseback. My father 
told me that Bibikof always considered it necessary to 
talk on intellectual subjects with him, and often put 
him scientific questions, such as "Why does the sun 
shine?" 

The chief constable of the hundred was so respect- 
ful that he never took the liberty of driving right up 
to the house. When he got within a mile he used 
to tie up his bell,^ and when he got within a hundred 
yards he used to stop his horses in the avenue and 
come on to the house on foot. He was received in 
the hall and never shaken hands with. 

We also looked down on the village children. I 
never took any interest in them till I found they 
could teach me things I knew nothing of and was 
forbidden to know. I was about ten years old then. 
We used to go down to the village to toboggan on 
footstools in the snow, and struck up a friendship 
with the peasants' children ; but papa soon discovered 
the interest we took in them and put a stop to it. 

6 The bell is a bell like a dinner bell hung in the dugd or wooden 
arch which rises from the shafts over the horse's neck. The police 
officer in question is head of a Stan, which is a division of the 
District, which is a division of the Province. 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

And so we grew up, surrounded on every side by a 
stone wall of English nurses, and French, German, 
and Russian tutors; and in these surroundings our 
parents had no difficulty in keeping an eye on all we 
did, and directing our life the way they wanted it to 
go, especially as they were both quite of one mind 
about our upbringing and their views had as yet 
shown no tendency to diverge. 

Besides certain subjects which my father under- 
took to teach us himself, he paid particular attention 
to our physical development, to gymnastics and all 
kinds of athletics tending to develop courage and 
self-reliance. At one period he used to take us all 
every day to a place in one of the avenues where 
there was an outdoor gymnasium ; and we all had to 
go through a number of difficult exercises in turn on 
the trapeze and rings and parallel bars. 

The most difficult of all was an exercise on the 
trapeze where you had to pass through between your 
hands with your back to the bar; this exercise was 
known as "Mikhail Ivanovitch." Papa and Mon- 
sieur Rey could do it, but it was difficult for us boys 
and we had a lot of trouble before we could manage 
it. Seryozha achieved it first, and I was a bad sec- 
ond. 

When we were going out for a walk or a ride papa 
never waited for those who were late, and when I 
lagged behind and cried he used to mimic me and say, 

310 




TOLSTOY AND HIS GRANDCHILDREN 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Nobody waits for me !" and I used to bellow louder 
than ever and get perfectly furious; but I caught 
them up all the same. 

The word "milksop" was a favorite word of abuse 
with us and there was nothing more humiliating in 
the world than for one of us to be called a milksop 
by my father. I remember how my grandmother 
Pelageya Ilymitchna was once trimming a lamp and 
took the hot chimney in her hands. It burnt her so 
badly that it raised blisters on her iingers, but she did 
not drop the chimney; she put it carefully down on 
the table. Papa was a witness of this, and whenever 
he had occasion to blame any of us for cowardice 
afterwards he used to recall the incident and hold it 
up before us as an example. "There 's pluck for 
you ! Your grandmother had a perfect right to drop 
the chimney on the floor: it only cost a penny, and 
your granny can earn five times as much as that 
in a day by her knitting alone; but still she did n't. 
She burnt her fingers, but she did n't drop it. 
You 'd have dropped it. . . . And I dare say I 
should too !" he added, quite enthusiastic at her cour- 
age. 

My father hardly ever made us do anything; but it 
always somehow came about that of our own initia- 
tive we did exactly what he wanted us to. My 
mother often scolded us and punished us; but when 
my father wanted to make us do something he merely 

313 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

looked us hard in the eyes, and we understood: his 
look was far more effective than any command. 

Here is an illustration of the difference between 
my father's method and my mother's. Supposing 
you wanted a sixpence for something. If you went 
to my mother she would ask a lot of questions about 
what it was for, and tell you you were very naughty, 
and occasionally refuse. If you went to my father 
he would ask no questions, would merely look 
you in the eyes and say: "You'll find one on the 
table !" But however much I wanted that sixpence 
I never used to go and get it from my father but 
always preferred to go and get it out of my mother. 

To please my father, my brother Seryozha spent 
a whole winter learning Latin, and when he could 
read it, went and showed my father as a surprise. 

My father's great power as an educator lay in this, 
that it was as impossible to conceal anything from 
him as from one's own conscience. He knew ev- 
erything, and to deceive him was just like deceiving 
oneself : it was nearly impossible and quite useless. 

My father's influence over me was very vividly 
displayed in the question of my marriage and in my 
relations with women before my marriage. 

Sometimes the most trifling incident or the most 
casual word said at the right moment leaves a deep 
impression and influences the whole of a man's after- 
life. So it was with me. 

314 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

One morning I was running down the long straight 
staircase at home at Yasnaya taking two steps at a 
time and, according to custom, jumping down the 
last few steps with a dashing acrobatic jump. I was 
sixteen at the time and pretty strong, and the jump 
was a very fine performance. At that moment my 
father happened to be coming across the hall towards 
the foot of the staircase. When he saw me flying 
through the air he stopped at the bottom and spread 
out his arms to catch me in case I missed my footing 
and fell. I sank down agilely on my heels, straight- 
ened myself up and said good-morning. 

"What an athletic young chap you are !" he said, 
smiling and evidently admiring my boyish vigor. 
"A young fellow like you would have been married 
long since among the villagers ; and here you are not 
knowing what to do with all your energy." 

I did not say anything at the time, but those words 
of his produced an immense impression on me. 
What struck me most was not the implied reproach 
for my idleness, but the new idea that I was really 
so grown up that it was "time to marry me." I knew 
that my father felt very earnestly about the chastity 
of young people ; I knew how much strength he laid 
on purity; and an early marriage seemed to me the 
best solution of the difficult question which must 
harass every thoughtful boy when he attains to man's 
estate. I do not for a moment suppose that when he 

315 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

uttered those words, my father foresaw the effect they 
would have on me ; but they were undoubtedly spoken 
from the bottom of his heart and that is why they left 
such a deep impression behind them. I not only 
understood them in their literal import; I felt all the 
deep significance of what was left unsaid. 

• ••••••• 

Two or three years later, when I was eighteen and 
we were living in Moscow, I fell in love with a young 
lady I knew, — she is now my wife, — and went almost 
every Saturday to her father's house. My father 
knew but said nothing. One day when he was going 
out for a walk I asked if I might come with him. 
As I very seldom went for walks with him in Moscow 
he guessed that I wanted to have a serious talk with 
him about something, and after walking some dis- 
tance in silence, evidently feeling that I was shy 
about it and did not like to break the ice, he suddenly 
began. 

"You seem to go pretty often to the F s'." 

I said that I was very fond of the eldest daughter. 

"What do you want*? To marry her?" 

"Yes." 

"Is she a good girl? . . . Well, mind you don't 
make a mistake; and don't be false to her," he said 
with a curious gentleness and thoughtfulness. 

I left him at once and ran back home, delighted, 
along the Arbat. I was glad that I had told him the 

316 




TOLSTOY, HIS SON LYOF, AND THE SON OF LYOF 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

truth ; and his affectionate and cautious way of taking 
it strengthened my affection both for him to whom 
I was boundlessly grateful for his depth of feeling; 
and for her, whom I loved still more warmly from 
that moment, and to whom I resolved still more fer- 
vently never to be untrue. 

My father's tactfulness towards us amounted al- 
most to timidity. There were certain questions 
which he could never bring himself to touch on for 
fear of causing us pain. 

I shall never forget how once in Moscow I found 
him sitting writing at the table in my room, when I 
dashed in suddenly to change my clothes. My bed 
stood behind a screen which hid him from me. 

When he heard my footsteps he said without look- 
ing round : 

"Isthatyou, Ilydr 

"Yes, it 's me." 

"Are you alone? Shut the door. . . . There's 
no one to hear us and we can't see each other, so we 
shall not feel ashamed. Tell me, did you ever have 
anything to do with women *?" 

When I said No, I suddenly heard him break out 
sobbing, like a little child. 

I sobbed and cried too, and for a long time we 
stayed weeping tears of joy with the screen between 
us, and we were neither of us ashamed, but both so 
joyful, that I look on that moment as one of the hap- 

319 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

piest in my whole life. No arguments or homilies 
could ever have effected what the emotion I experi- 
enced at that moment did. Such tears as those shed 
by a father of sixty can never be forgotten even in 
moments of the strongest temptation. 



Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, my father 
watched my inner development most attentively, 
noted all my doubts and hesitations, encouraged me 
in my good impulses, and often found fault with me 
for inconsistency. I still have some of his letters 
written at that time. The first, only a postcard, was 
written from Yasnaya, when he had a bad leg,"^ and 
I and my brothers Seryozha and Lyolya were living 
in Moscow with Nikolai Nikolayevitch Gay, the 
artist's son. 

You get letters from here every day and of course you 
all know all about me. I write myself just "to make sure." 
General condition good. If anything to complain of it 's 
bad nights, in consequence of which my head is unclear 
and I cannot work. I lie and listen to women talking; 
am so lapped in femininity I begin to talk of myself as 
"she." ^ Am peaceful in my mind ; sometimes a little anx- 
ious about some of you, about your spiritual welfare, but 
do not allow myself to worry, and wait and rejoice in the 
forward course of life. As long as you don't undertake 

7 This was in 1886. Tolstoy had erysipelas from a neglected 
sore on his leg. Maude's "Life." 

8 Literally: "I begin to say Ya spald, I slept," i. e., in the femi- 
nine, instead of ya spdl, in the masculine. 

320 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

too much, and live without doing evil, all will be well. I 
kiss you all including Koletchka.^ 

The next two letters both belong to the same period 
as the first : 

I had just written you, my dear friend Ilya, a letter that 
was true to my own feelings but, I am afraid, unjust, and 
I am not sending it. I said unpleasant things in it, but I 
have no right to do so. I do not know you as I should like 
to and as I ought to know you. That is my fault, and I 
wish to remedy ito I know much in you that I do not like, 
but I do not know everything. As for your proposed jour- 
ney home, I think that in your position as a student — not 
only student of a Gymnase, but at the age of study — it is 
better to gad about as little as possible; moreover, all use- 
less expenditure of money that you can easily refrain from 
is immoral in my opinion, and in yours too if you only con- 
sider it. If you come, I shall be glad for my own sake, 
so long as you are not inseparable from G, 

Do as you think best. But you must work, both with 
your head, thinking and reading, and with your heart, i.e., 
find out for yourself what is really good and what is bad 
although it seems to be good. I kiss youo L. T. 

Dear friend Ilyd, 

There is always somebody or something that prevents me 
from answering your two letters, which are important and 
dear to me, especially the last. First it was Buturlin, then 
bad health, insomnia, then the arrival of D., the friend of 
H. that I wrote you about. He is sitting at tea talking to 
the ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left them, 

9 Nikolai Gay. 

321 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and want to write what little I can find time to, of all that 
I have been thinking about you. 

Even supposing that So A. demands too much of you,^^ 
there is no harm in waiting; especially from the point of 
view of fortifying your opinions, your faith. That is the 
one important thing. If you don't, it is a fearful disaster 
to put off from one shore and not reach the other. 

The one shore is a good and honest life, for your own 
delight and the profit of others. But there is a bad life 
too, a life so sugared, so common to all, that if you follow 
it you do not notice that it is a bad life, and suffer only in 
your conscience, if you have one; but if you leave it and 
do not reach the real shore, you will be made miserable by 
solitude and by the reproach of having deserted your fel- 
lows, and you will be ashamed. In short, I want to say 
that it is out of the question to want to be rather good ; 
it is out of the question to jump into the water unless you 
know how to swim. One must be sincere and wish to be 
good with all one's might. Do you feel this in you? The 
drift of what I say is that we all know what Princess Maria 
Alexeyevna's ^^ verdict about your marriage would be : that 
if young people marry without a sufficient fortune it means 
children, poverty, getting tired of each other in a year or 
two, in ten years, quarrels, want — hell. And in all this 
Princess Maria Alexeyevna is perfectly right and plays the 
true prophet, unless the young people who are getting 

10 I had written to my father that ray fiancee's mother would not 
let me marry for two years. — I. T. 

11 My father took Griboyedof s Princess Maria Alexeyevna as a 
type. — I. T. The allusion is to the last words of Griboyedof's 
famous comedy, "The Misfortune of Cleverness," 1824. "What will 
Princess Marya Alexevna say?" She is merely Mrs. Grundy, not 
a character in the play. 

322 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

married have another purpose, their one and only one, un- 
known to Princess Maria Alexeyevna, and that not a brain- 
ish purpose, not one recognized by the intellect, but one that 
gives life its color and the attainment of which is more mov- 
ing than any other. If you have this, good ; marry at once, 
and give the lie to Princess Maria Alexeyevna. If not, it 
is a hundred to one that your marriage will lead to nothing 
but misery. I am speaking to you from the bottom of my 
heart. Receive my words into the bottom of yours and 
weigh them well. Besides love for you as a son, I have 
love for you also as a man standing at the cross-ways. I 
kiss you and Lyolya and Koletchka and Seryozha, if he is 
back. We are all alive and welL 

The following letter belongs to the same period : 

Your letter to Tanya has arrived, my dear friend Ilya, 
and I see that you are still advancing towards that purpose 
which you set up for yourself; and I want to write to you 
and to her — for no doUbt you tell her everything — what I 
think about it. Well, I think about it a great deal, with 
joy and with fear, mixed. This is what I think. If one 
marries in order to enjoy oneself more, no good will ever 
come of it. To set up as one's main object, ousting every- 
thing else, marriage, union with the being you love, is a 
great mistake. And an obvious one, if you think about it. 
Object, marriage. Well, you marry; and what then? If 
you had no other object in life before your marriage, it will 
be twice as fearfully hard, almost impossible, to find one. 
In fact you may be sure, if you had no common purpose 
before your marriage, nothing can bring you together, you 
will keep getting further apart. Marriage can never bring 
happiness unless those who marry have a common purpose. 

323 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Two people meet on the road and say, "Let's walk to- 
gether." Let them; they will go hand in hand; but not if 
they hold out their hands to each other and both turn off the 
road. 

In the first case it will be like this : 



Death 




The reason of this is that the idea shared by many that 
life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea, shared by 
the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and 
riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment. 
Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to 
suffer at times a good deal that is hard to bear, but more 
often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can 
only be real if people look upon their life as a service, and 
have a definite object in life outside themselves and their 
personal happiness. 

As a rule, people who are getting married completely for- 
get this. So many joyful events await them in the future, 

324 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

in wedlock and the arrival of children, that those events 
seem to constitute life itself. But this is a dangerous illu- 
sion. 

If parents merely live from day to day begetting chil- 
dren, and have no purpose in life, they are only putting 
off the question of the purpose of life and that punishment 
which is allotted to people who live without knowing why; 
they are only putting it off and not escaping it, because they 
will have to bring up their children and guide their steps, 
but they will have nothing to guide them by. And then the 
parents lose their human qualities and the happiness which 
depends on the possession of them, and turn into mere 
breeding-stock. That is why I say that people who are 
proposing to marry because their life seems to them to be 
full must more than ever set themselves to think and make 
clear to their own minds what it is that each of them lives 
for. 

And in order to make this clear you must consider your 
present circumstances and your past life ; reckon up what 
you consider important and what unimportant in life; 
find out what you believe in; that is, what you look on as 
eternal and immutable truth, and what you will take for 
your guide in life. And not only find out, make clear to 
your own mind, but try to practise or to learn to practise 
in your daily life, because until you practise what you be- 
lieve you cannot tell whether you believe it or not. 

I know your faith, and that faith, or those sides of it 
which can be expressed in deeds, you must now, more than 
ever, make clear to your own mind by putting them into 
practice. Your faith is that your welfare consists in lov- 
ing people and being loved by them. For the attainment 
of this end I know of three lines of action, in which I per- 

325 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

petually exercise myself, in which one can never exercise 
oneself enough and which are especially necessary to you 
now. 

First, in order to be able to love people and to be loved by 
them, one must accustom oneself to expect as little as pos- 
sible from them, and that is very hard work (for if I ex- 
pect much and am often disappointed, I am inclined rather 
to reproach them than to love them). 

Second, in order to love people not in word but in deed, 
one must train oneself to do what benefits them. That 
needs still harder work, especially at your age when it is 
one's natural business to be studying. 

Third, in order to love people and to b.l.b.t.^^ one must 
train oneself to gentleness, humility, the art of bearing with 
disagreeable people and things, the art of behaving to them 
so as not to offend any one, of being able to choose the least 
offence. And this is the hardest work of all, work that 
never ceases from the time you wake till the time you go 
to sleep, and the most joyful work of all, because day after 
day you rejoice in your growing success in it and receive a 
further reward (unperceived at first but very joyful after- 
wards) in being loved by others. 

So I advise you, friend Ilya, and both of you, to live and 
to think as sincerely as you can, because it is the only way 
you can discover if you are really going along the same road, 
and whether it is wise to join hands or not; and at the 
same time, if you are sincere, you must be making your 
future ready. Your purpose in life must not be to enjoy 
the delight of wedlock but, by your life, to bring more love 
and truth into the world. The object of marriage is to help 
one another in the attainment of that purpose. 

12 Be loved by them. 

326 




TOLSTOY AND ALEXANDRA 
She wa.^ her father's last secretary 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

The vilest and most selfish life is the life of the people 
who have joined together only in order to enjoy life; and 
the highest vocation in the world is that of those who live 
in order to serve God by bringing good into the world, and 
who have joined together for that express purpose. Don't 
mistake half-measures for the real thing. Why should a 
man not choose the highest? Only, when you have chosen 
the highest, you must set your whole heart on it and not 
just a little. Just a little leads to nothing. There, I am 
tired of writing and still have much left that I wanted to 
say. I kiss you. 



329 



CHAPTER XXI 

MY MARRIAGE. MY FATHER'S LETTERS. VAN- 
ITCHKA. HIS DEATH. 

IN February, 1888, I married and went with my 
bride to Yasnaya Polyana, where we estab- 
lished ourselves for two months in three rooms 
on the ground floor. In the spring I was to move to 
Alexander Farm, on our property "Nikolskoye" in 
the Tchornski District, where I intended to build 
myself a house and settle. Soon after my marriage 
I received the following letter from my father. 

How are you, my dear children? Are you alive*? Are 
you alive in spirit? This is an important time that you 
are passing through. Everything is important now, every 
step is important; remember that: your life together is 
taking shape now, the life of your mutual relations, the 
new organism, the homme'femme, one being, and the re- 
lations of that compound being to all the rest of the world, 
to Marya Afanasyevna,^ to Kostyushka, etc., and to the 
inanimate world, to your food, your clothing, etc. Every- 
thing is new. If you want anything, want it now. And 
most important of all, you will now have your moods 
of mauvaise humeur; and you will always be showing 
yourselves off to one another in false colors; do not be- 
lieve in this; do not believe in evil; wait and all will 

iThe servant. 

330 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

come right again. I do not know about Sonya, but Ilya 
is prone to this and he must be careful about it. 

To you, Sonya, I say this: you will suddenly find your- 
self bored, oh, so bored, so bored, so bored. Do not believe 
in it, do not give way to it; be assured that it is not bore- 
dom but your spirit's simple demand for work, any kind, 
manual, intellectual, it 's all the same. The chief thing, 
chiefer than any, is, be kind to people, not kind from a 
distance, but accessible from near. If that is so, life will 
be full and happy. Well, stick to it ! I kiss you and love 
you both dearly. I have just heard that Khilkof ^ is 
marrying Dzhunkovski's wife's sister. I do not know her. 

At the end of March my father came to Yasnaya 
himself and stayed there with us until we left for 
Nikolskoye. We had nobody but an old woman, 
Marya Afanasyevna, in the house with us; she was 
very feeble and was already pensioned off, so that 
we had to do without servants, cook our own dinner, 
fetch water and do the rooms ourselves. 

My father helped us as well as he could, but I must 
confess, I came to the conclusion that he was ex- 
tremely little fitted for the Robinson Crusoe life. It 
is true that he was not at all exacting, and always 
vowed that everything was first rate. But habit told 
— he had been accustomed for so many years to a 
particular order of life, a particular diet, that every 
departure from that order, even when he was only 

2 This is the well-known Prince Khilkof who gave up his estates 
to his peasants, lived as a workman, and helped to settle the Douk- 
hobors in Canada. (Maude's "Life.") 

331 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

sixty, had a disastrous effect on his health. It hap- 
pened again and again that when he had gone away 
quite healthy from home and found himself in new 
conditions, he came back ill ; even when he had been 
staying with people who knew all his habits and 
looked after him like a little child. 

At the end of April I and my wife went to our 
farm, and from that time forth I never lived at 
Yasnaya again, but only went on short visits, either 
on business, or simply to see my parents. After leav- 
ing Yasnaya I and my wife had the following letter 
from my father : 

Did you have a good journey, my dear friends? We 
are sad and bored without you; that is to say, we are sorry 
that you are no longer with us. The enclosed telegram 
has come for you; nothing has been done about it. I ex- 
pect there 's no harm in that. Write how you have settled 
in and what your plans are. My health is quite good now. 
Our Temperance Society is having a great success; a num- 
ber have signed; one of them, Danilo, has found time to 
sign and get drunk again since signing. I am not at all 
alarmed about it; but I wait for you, Ilya, very anxiously, 
and shall be glad for your sake when you give up those 
two nasty habits, alcohol and tobacco, which are outside 
growths grafted on and do not belong to regular life. Life 
is no joking matter, especially for you now: every step you 
take is important. There is a great deal of good in you 
and Sonya, above all, purity and love; preserve them with 
all your might; but there are many, many dangers that 
threaten you both; you do not see them, but I do, and I 




COUNTESS TOLSTOY 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

am afraid. Well, au revoir^ I kiss you both, and every one 
sends their love. Write. Every one in Moscow, according 
to the last letters, is making successful preparations to 
hurry home. L. T. 

The following letter was written by my father in 
reference to the birth of my first daughter Anna : 

I congratulate you, dear and beloved young parents. 
My congratulation is not a form of words ; I was so unex- 
pectedly delighted at hearing of my granddaughter that I 
want to share my delight and thank you, and I understand 
your delight. I now look at all girls and women with pity 
and contempt. What 's this creature ? Ah, you should see 
Anna; she'll be the genuine thing! But joking apart 
. . . and yet what I said was not a joke ; but in still greater 
seriousness, this is what I want to say: mind you both 
bring up this granddaughter, or daughter, wisely: don't 
make the mistakes that were made with you two, the mis- 
takes of the period. I believe that Anna will be better 
brought up, less cockered and spoilt with genteelness than 
you were. How is Sonya? It is terrifying to be waiting 
and thinking that something may have gone wrong after 
all. However, everything will be all right, so long as 
everything is all right in the heart, and that is my chief wish 
to you. How glad I am that Sofya Alexeyevna ^ is with 
you; kiss her and congratulate her for me. I kiss you 
both. L. T. 

It was after my marriage, In the spring, that my 
mother had her youngest son, Vanitchka (Ivan). 
This child, who only lived to be seven and died of 

3 Count Ilya's mother-in-law. 

335 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

scarlet fever in 1895, was the darling of the whole 
family. My mother doted on him and my father 
loved him as his youngest son with all the strength of 
a father's and an old man's heart. 

To tell the truth, my father had taken very little 
interest in the upbringing of the two preceding chil- 
dren, my brothers, Andrei and Mikhail. They 
reached the age, for going to school when he was 
already in full opposition to the method of education 
which had been applied to the rest of us ; so that, not 
feeling himself capable of directing them as he would 
have liked in accordance with his convictions, he 
turned his back on them, washed his hands of them, 
and never took any active interest in their life or their 
education.^ My mother sent them first of all to 
Polivanof's Gymnase, where I and my brother Lyof 
had been, and later they were transferred to the 
Katkof Lycee. 

I think my father regarded Vanitchka as his spir- 
itual successor and dreamed of bringing him up 
according to his own ideas, in the principles of Chris- 
tian love and goodness. I knew Vanitchka less than 
my other brothers and sisters, because I was already 
living apart while he was growing up, but from what 
I saw of him I was struck by the remarkably aff ection- 

* These two sons took no Interest in their father's views; both 
went into the army; one of them joined the Black Hundred. 
(Maude's "Life."), 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ate and responsive heart that this physically delicate 
and sickly child had. 

Vanitchka was only eighteen months old when my 
father resolved to give up his landed property, and 
divided his estate between the members of the family. 
To Vanitchka, as the youngest, was allotted part of 
Yasnaya Polyana, with the house and demesnCo^ A 
more distant part of the estate was allotted to my 
mother. 

My mother told me, after Vanitchka's death, how 
one day, when she was walking in the garden with 
him, she explained that all that land was hiSo 

"No, mama, don't say that Yasnaya Polyana is 
mine !" he said, stamping his foot. "Everything 's 
every oneses',^' 

When I received the telegram announcing his 
death, I went into Moscow at once. My mother told 
me what my father said after Vanitchka's death: 
"It is the first irremediable sorrow of my life!" 
Vanitchka was buried in the village churchyard at 
Nikolskoye, beyond All Saints, not far from Mos- 
cow, where my other little brother Alyosha had been 
buried before him. When the coffin was lowered 
into the grave, my father sobbed and said very, very 
softly, so that I could only just distinguish the 
words : 

s According to a custom equivalent to "Borough English." Tol- 
stoy had himself inherited Yasnaya Polydna in the quality of 
youngest son. 

337 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"Taken from the earth, to the earth thou shalt 
return." ^ 

He used these same words in a letter to his brother 
Sergei Nikolayevitch apropos of his brother Nikolai's 
death in i860. And since Nikolai's death Vanitch- 
ka's was the greatest loss he had ever known. 

It has often struck me that if Vanitchka had lived 
many things in my father's life would very likely 
have been different. This child, with his insight 
and responsiveness, might have attached him to his 
family, and he would never have been haunted by 
the thought of leaving Yasnaya Polyana. I am en- 
couraged in this supposition by a letter which my 
father wrote to my mother a year and a half after 
Vanitchka' s death. 

Here is the letter, which I give in full : 

Yasnaya Polyana, June 8th, 1897. 
My dear Sonya^ 

I have long been tormented by the incongruity between 
my life and my beliefs. To make you change your way 
of Hfe, your habits, which I taught you myself, was impos- 
sible; to leave you has so far also been impossible, for I 
thought that I should be depriving the children, while they 
were still young, of the influence, however small, which I 
might have over them, and should be causing you pain. 
But to continue to live as I have been living these sixteen 
years, at one time struggling and harassing you, at an- 

6 "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." — Genesis 
iii, 19. 

338 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

other yielding to those influences and temptations to which 
I was accustomed and by which I was surrounded, has also 
become impossible for me at last; and I have now made 
up my mind to do what I have long wished to do, to go 
away ; first, because with my advancing years this life grows 
more and more burdensome to me and I long more and more 
for solitude; and secondly, because the children have now 
grown up, my influence is no longer necessary and you all 
have livelier interests, which will make you notice my ab- 
sence less. 

But the chief reason is, that as the Hindus when they 
near the sixties retire into the forests, as every religious old 
man desires to dedicate the last years of his life to God 
and not to jokes, puns, gossip, and lawn tennis, so I, who am 
now entering on my seventieth year, long, with all the 
strength of my spirit, for that tranquillity and solitude and, 
though not perfect accord, still something better than this 
crying discord between my life and my beliefs and con- 
science. 

If I did this openly, I should be met with entreaties, re- 
proaches, and arguments, and perhaps I should falter and 
fail to carry out my resolution, and it has got to be carried 
out. Please forgive me therefore if this step that I am 
taking causes you pain ; and in your heart, Sonya, above all, 
let me go of your own free will, do not seek for me, do not 
find fault with me, do not condemn me. 

My leaving you does not mean that I am dissatisfied with 
youo I know that you could not, literally could not, and 
cannot, see and feel as I do, and therefore you could not 
and cannot alter your life and make sacrifices for the sake 
of what you do not believe in. I do not find fault with 
you; on the contrary I recall, with love and gratitude, the 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

long thirty-five years of our life together, especially the first 
half of it, when, with that maternal self-renunciation which 
is characteristic of you, you bore, so zealously and patiently, 
with what you thought was your appointed burden. You 
gave me and the world what you were able to give. You 
gave much maternal love and self-sacrifice, and I cannot 
but esteem you for that. But during the latter period of 
our life, during the last fifteen years, we have fallen away 
from one another. I can believe that I am to blame, be- 
cause I know that I have changed, not for my own sake 
or for the sake of other people's opinion, but because I could 
not help it. And I cannot blame you for not having fol- 
lowed me, but I thank you and I lovingly recall and always 
shall recall all that you have given me. Good-by, dear 
Sonya. 

Your loving 

Lyof Tolstoy, 

On the envelope was written: "If I make no 
special resolution about this letter, it is to be handed 
to S. A."^ after my death." 

This letter did not come to my mother's hands till 
after my father's death. Later, perhaps, I shall re- 
turn to this most important document, which explains 
many questions which are beyond the comprehension 
of most. I have quoted it here in connection with 
Vanitchka's death, because it seems to me that there 
is an undoubted inner connection between the two 
things. The idea of leaving home cannot have oc- 
curred to my father immediately after the death of 

7 Sofya Andreyevna, the Countess. 

342 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

his son, for at that time, he fully shared with my 
mother the "fearfully overwrought condition of 
mind" in which she was. 

This is what he wrote on that subject: 

Now that she is suffering I feel more than ever, with all 
my being, the truth of the words that man and wife are not 
separate individuals but one. . , . I long intensely to instil 
into her even a portion of that religious consciousness which 
I have — although in a slight degree, but still enough to 
give me the power of rising at times above the sorrows of 
life — because I know that nothing but that, the conscious- 
ness of God and of being his son can give life, and I 
hope that it may be instilled into her, not by me of course, 
but by God. Though it is very hard for that consciousness 
to be awakened in women, 

A year and a half later, when the sharpness of my 
mother's sorrow was beginning to pass, my father felt 
himself morally freer and wrote the farewell letter 
I have quotedc 



343 



CHAPTER XXII 

HELP FOR THE FAMINE-STRICKEN 

AFTER the Moscow Census, after my father 
had come to the conclusion that it was not 
only useless to help people with money, but 
immoral, the part he took in distributing food among 
the peasants during the famines of 1890, 1891, and 
1898 may seem to have shown inconsistency and con- 
tradiction ol thought. 

'If a horseman sees that his horse is tired out, he 
must not remain seated on its back and hold up its 
head, but simply get off," he used to say, condemning 
all the charities of the well-fed people who sit on 
the back of the working-classes, continue to enjoy all 
the benefits of their privileged position and merely 
give from their superfluity. He did not believe in 
the good of such charity and considered it a form of 
self -hallucination, all the more harmful, because 
people thereby acquire a sort of moral right to con- 
tinue their idle aristocratic life and go on increasing 
the poverty of the people. 

In the autumn of 1890 my father thought of 
writing an article on the famine which had then 

344 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

spread over nearly all Russia. Although he already 
knew the extent of the peasantry's disaster through 
the newspapers and the accounts brought by those 
who came from the famine-stricken parts, never- 
theless, when his old friend Ivan Ivanovitch 
Rayevski called on him at Yasnaya Polyana and 
proposed that he should drive through to the Dankov- 
ski District with him in order to see the state of things 
in the villages for himself, he readily agreed and went 
with him to his property at Begitchevka. He went 
there with the intention of staying only a day or 
two; but when he saw what a call there was for 
immediate measures, he at once set to work to help 
Rayevski, who had already instituted several kitchens 
in the villages, in relieving the distress of the peas- 
antry, at first on a small scale and then, when big 
subscriptions began to pour in from every side, on a 
continually increasing one. The upshot of it was 
that he devoted two whole years of his life to the 
work. 

It is wrong to think that my father showed any 
inconsistency in this matter. He did not delude 
himself for a moment into thinking he was engaged 
on a virtuous and epoch-making task, but when he 
saw the sufferings of the people he simply could not 
bear to stay comfortably at Yasnaya or in Moscow 
any longer, but had to go out and help in order to 
relieve his own feelings. 

345 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

"There is much about it that is not what it ought to be ; 
there is S. A.'s money ^ and the subscriptions, there is the 
relation of those who feed and those who are fed. There 
is sin without end^ but I cannot stay at home and write. I 
feel the necessity of taking part in it, of doing something," 
he wrote from the Province of Ryazan to Nikolai Niko- 
layevitch Gay« 

At the very outset of his work at Begitchevka he 
suffered a great sorrow. In November, Ivan Ivan- 
ovitch Rayevski, who traveled constantly about 
on business connected with the famine, sometimes to 
Zemstvo meetings, sometimes among the hamlets 
and villages, caught cold, took a severe influenza 
and died. This loss, it seems to me, imposed on my 
father a moral obligation to continue the work he 
had begun and carry it through to the end. Ra- 
yevski was one of my father's oldest friends. He 
once had the reputation of being a very strong man 
and I believe he made my father's acquaintance in 
Moscow when they both went in for physical culture 
and attended Poire t the Frenchman's Gymnastic 
School. I remember him very far back, from my ear- 
liest childhood, when he used to visit Yasnaya Poly- 
ana and when he was united to my father by sporting 
interests such as coursing and race horses. This was 
in the seventies. Later, when my father had quite 
given up his former hobbies, his friendship with Ivan 

iHis wife's. 

345 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Ivanovitch still continued, and I think they were 
never such close friends as during the short space of 
time when they were drawn together by the general 
distress and their joint work in coping with it. Ra- 
yevski put all his heart into the business, and with 
his great practicalness and the devoted energy with 
which he set about it, he was an ideal fellow-worker 
and comrade for my father. 

That winter, owing to bad health I think, my 
father had to leave Begitchevka for a couple of 
months and asked me to take his place in the mean- 
time. I got ready to go at once, handed over the 
management of the famine-relief in the Tchomski 
District to my wife and started for Begitchevka. 
The work established there by my father was on a 
truly stupendous scale. 

I found only one assistant of his on the spot, a 
Miss P., a woman of splendid energy, with whom 
I worked all the time. After a time I got the fol- 
lowing letter from my father; it was brought by a 
young lady whom he sent to help us. 

Dear friend llyusha. 

This letter will be brought you by Miss V., a girl who 
knows how to work. Let her act as your assistant for the 
time being; after the 20th when we arrive we will make 
some other arrangement about her. I am very sorry I did 
not write to you to come and see me at home first, so as to 
talk everything over with you. I am very much afraid 
that from ignorance of the conditions you may make a lot 

347 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of mistakes. There is so much that I ought to say that 
I do not even try to say it, especially as I do not know what 
you are doing. 

One thing I beg: be as careful as you can, carry things 
out without altering my plans. And above all take care 
about the purchase and carriage of the corn that comes, and 
its regular disposal in the granaries, and see that you do not 
let people into the kitchens who can feed themselves on what 
they get from the Zemstvo, and on the other hand do not 
turn away those who are really in need. 

It is time to help the poorest with firing. This is a very 
important and difficult job; and in this case, however un- 
desirable, it is better that those who do not need it should 
get it than that those who do should not. 

What about the hay from Usof ? I am afraid of Yermo- 
layef making a hash of it. They mention scattered trusses. 
It must be picked up at once and sent to Lebedef at Kolodezi. 
Look out for potatoes in private stores; see if they won't 
sell ; and buy them. There is much more to say but I can- 
not settle it by correspondence, not knowing how things are 
going. I rely on you. Please do all you can. I kiss you. 
Give my compliments to Elena Mikhailovna and Natasha 
and every one there. L. T. 

The "helper" who brought me this letter drove in 
from the station just as I and Miss P. were sitting 
down to supper. The old carpenter who acted as our 
manservant threw open the door and said: "The 
Lord has sent another young lady." And in walked 
a University girl with a big bottle of Montpassiers 
under her arm and handed me my father's letter. 

348 




TOLSTOY VISITING THE WOMEN S SECTION OF THE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL 

AT POKROF 




AMONG THE PATIENTS AND DOCTORS AT THE TROITSA DISTRICT, PSYCHIA- 
TRIC HOSPITAL 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

I offered her a chair and asked her to have some 
suppen 

There was salted cabbage with quass, and black 
bread on the table. 

The unhappy Muscovitess took a look at it, swal- 
lowed a couple of spoonfuls and fell into a plaintive 
silence, looking tenderly at her sweetmeats, as who 
should say: "I'm in the famine district now; 
there 's nothing but cabbage to be had. What ever 
would have happened if I had n't been bright enough 
to bring my caramels with me?" 

When the cutlets came in, she beamed with de- 
light. 

The next day at dawn she asked to be given some 
work. I gave orders to put in a horse for her and 
asked her to drive to the village of Gai with a coach- 
man and make a list of all who were being relieved 
at the public kitchen. 

Half an hour later in rushed Dmitry Ivanovitch 
Rayevski, brother of Ivan Ivanovitch, all covered 
with snow, and ejaculated in a terrified voice: 

"What have I seen? There 's a blizzard outside; 
and a child standing in a sledge, whirling across 
country all alone. It 's one of the horses from here. 
Who is it?" 

I simply gasped. The girl had gone off without 
a coachman. Heaven knows where. I had to send 
a man to look for her, and bring her home. 

351 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Another day, as I left the house, I told her to dis- 
tribute the firewood for the kitchens.^ All our own 
firewood was damp, being freshly cut, and we had 
dry birch-wood sent by rail from the Province of 
Kaluga expressly as kindling. This wood was very 
expensive and we set enormous store by it. For 
every two cords of firewood we allowed only three 
cubic feet of dry logs. I explained all this to the 
young lady before I went out. 

When I got back, I found to my horror, that she 
had given out all the dry wood. "They asked for 
dry," she explained in justification. 

"But what are we to do now with our green wood? 
It won't burn without kindling." 

We had to look about and buy dry wood again 
and pay three times the former price for it. 

When my father returned to Begitchevka, I stayed 
with him for a time and then went back home. 
• ••■«••• 

Six years later I worked again at the same job with 
my father, in the Tchornski and Mtsenski districts. 
After the bad crops of the two preceding years it 
became clear by the beginning of the winter of 1898 
that a new famine was approaching in our neighbor- 
hood and that charitable assistance to the peasantry 
would be needed. I turned to my father for help. 
By the spring he had managed to collect some money 

2 The ovens being heated with wood, not coal. 

352 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

and at the beginning of April he came himself to see 
me. 

I must tell you that my father, who was very eco- 
nomical by nature, was extraordinarily cautious and 
I may say even parsimonious in the administration of 
charitable funds. It is easily understood, if one con- 
siders the unlimited confidence which he enjoyed 
among the subscribers and the great moral responsi- 
bility which he could not but feel towards them. 
So that before undertaking anything he had to 
be fully convinced himself of the necessity of 
help. 

The day after his arrival, we saddled a coupie of 
horses and rode out. We rode as we had ridden 
together twenty years before, when we went out 
coursing with the greyhounds, that is across country, 
over the fields. It was all the same to me which way 
we rode, as I believed that all the neighboring vil- 
lages were equally distressed, and my father, for the 
sake of old memories, wanted to revisit Spasskoye 
Lyutovinovo, which was only six miles from my 
house; he had not been there since Turgenyef's death. 
On the way I remember his telling me all about 
Turgenyef's mother, who was famous through all the 
neighborhood for her remarkable intelligence, energy, 
and eccentricity.^ I do not know if he ever saw her 

8 Ruling 5,000 serfs like a mad thing, drunk with power, after her 
husband's death,, with perpetual punishments and beatings. 

353 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

himself, or whether he was only telling me the reports 
that he had heard. 

As we rode across Turgenyef s park he recalled in 
passing how of old he and Ivan Sergeyevitch had 
disputed which park was the finer, Spasskoye or 
Yasnaya Polyana. I asked him : 

"And now which do you think'?" 

"Yasnaya Polyana is the best; though this is very 
fine, very fine indeed." 

In the village we visited the head man's and two or 
three other cottages, and came away disappointed. 
There was no famine. The peasants, who had been 
endowed at the Emancipation with a full share of 
good land, and had enriched themselves since by 
wage-earnings, were hardly in want at all. It is true 
that some of the yards were badly stocked; but there 
was none of that acute degree of want which amounts 
to famine and which strikes the eye at once. I even 
remember my father reproaching me a little for hav- 
ing sounded the alarm when there was no sufficient 
cause for it, and for a little while I felt rather 
ashamed and awkward before him. 

Of course when he talked to the peasants he asked 
each of them if he remembered Turgenyef and 
eagerly picked up anything they had to say about 
him. Some of the old men remembered him and 
spoke of him with great affection. 

Then we left Spasskoye. A mile and a half 

354 




TOLSTOY AND DR. MAKOVICKY, HIS PHYSICIAN AND FRIEND 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

further on we struck on a little hamlet called Pogi- 
belka,^ lying neglected and forgotten among the 
fields. We rode into it. The peasants here told us 
that they had received a "beggarly" share of the land 
at the division; it was inconveniently situated, some 
little way off; and when this spring arrived, things 
had come to such a pitch that all the eight yards 
together had only one cow and two horses between 
them. The rest of their cattle they had sold. Big 
and little they all went about begging. The next 
hamlet. Great Gubaryovka, was just as bad. 
Further on, it was still worse. 

We resolved to open kitchens without delay. We 
soon had our hands full. The hardest work of all, 
the finding out the number of mouths to be fed in 
each family, my father did almost entirely himself, 
and spent the whole day at it, often till late at night, 
riding about the villages. The preparation and dis- 
tribution of provisions was undertaken by my wife. 
Others came and helped. In a week we had about a 
dozen kitchens going in the Mtsenski District and 
the same in Tchomski. As it was beyond the means 
at our disposal to feed all the villagers without dis- 
tinction, we admitted for the most part the children, 
old men and women, and the sick to the kitchens, and 
I well remember how my father delighted in arriving 
in a village at the dinner-hour, and how touched he 

*The name has an ominous ring: from pogibel, destruction. 

357 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was by the reverential, almost prayerful attitude 
towards the food, which he noticed in those who were 
fed there. 

Unfortunately we did not manage to avoid diffi- 
culties with the authorities. The first thing that 
happened was that two young ladies who had come 
from Moscow and managed one of our big kitchens 
were simply turned out, under threat of closing the 
kitchen. Then the chief constable of the Hundred 
came and demanded to be shown the permit from the 
head of the Provincial police to open kitchens. I 
argued with him that there could not be any law for- 
bidding charity. Of course it was no use. 

At that moment my father came into the room and 
he and the chief constable had a friendly talk, the 
one arguing that people cannot be forbidden to eat, 
and the other asking him to put himself in the place 
of a man under authority who has orders from those 
above him to obey. 

"What would you have me do, Your Excellency'?" 

"It's very simple; don't work in a service where 
you can be made to act against your conscience." 

After that, for the sake of keeping the work going, 
I had to go and see the Governors of Oryol and Tula 
Provinces and finally send a telegram to the Minister 
of the Interior begging him "to remove obstacles put 
by local authorities in way of private charity not for- 
bidden by law." In this way we succeeded in saving 

358 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

the kitchens already set up, but we were not allowed 
to open fresh ones. My father left my house to go 
to the eastern parts of the Tchomski District, where 
he wanted to see how the young crops were doing; 
but he fell ill on the way and spent some days in bed 
at the house of my friends, the Levitskis. This is a 
letter he wrote to me and my wife after his departure. 

My dear friends Sony a and Ilyd, 

Please go on with the work as you have begun it and 
enlarge it if there is any real necessity. I can send you 
another £30. I am keeping £150 in reserve, as I wrote to 
the subscribers, and £200 has not yet come. I have sent 
off my article and account of expenditure of some £300 odd. 
Total expenses shown to date, about £2,500. Please, Ilyii- 
sha, send me a detailed account of the rest of the money 
spent, so that I may send it to the papers. My visit to you 
has left a delightful impression. I have come to know 
you both better, understand you and love you. My health 
is better, but 1 cannot say that it is good. Am very weak 
still. L. T. 

Many kisses to Annotchka and my dear grandchildren. 
Which of them have gone to Granny's? 



359 



CHAPTER XXIII 

MY father's illness IN THE CRIMEA. ATTITUDE 
TOWARDS DEATH. DESIRE FOR SUFFER- 



IN the autumn of 1901 my father was attacked 
by persistent feverishness and the doctors ad- 
vised him to spend the winter in the Crimea. 
The Countess Panina kindly lent him her villa 
"Gaspra" near Koreiz and he spent the winter there. 
Soon after his arrival he caught cold and had two 
illnesses one after the other, enteric fever and inflam- 
mation of the lungs. At one time his condition was 
so bad that the doctors had hardly any hope that he 
would ever rise from his bed again. Although his 
temperature was very high, he was conscious all the 
time; he dictated some reflections every day, and 
deliberately prepared for death. The whole family 
was with him and we all took turns in nursing him. 
I look back with pleasure on the nights when it fell to 
me to be on duty by him, and I sat in the balcony 
by the open window, listening to his breathing and 
to every sound in his room. My chief duty, as the 
strongest of the family, was to lift him up while the 

360 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

sheets were being changed. When they were making 
the bed I had to hold him in my arms like a child. 
I remember how my muscles quivered one day with 
the exertion. He looked at me with astonishment 
and said: 

"You surely don't find me heavy*? . . . What 
nonsense !" 

I thought of that day when he had given me such 
a bad time out riding in the woods as a boy and kept 
asking: "You're not tired?" 

Another time, during the same illness, he wanted 
ine to carry him downstairs in my arms by the wind- 
ing stone staircase. 

"Pick me up like they do a baby and carry me." 

He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble 
and kill him. It was all I could do to insist on 
his being carried down in an arm-chair by three of 
us. 

Was my father afraid of death? It is impossible 
to answer the question in one word. With his tough 
constitution and physical strength he always instinc- 
tively fought not only against death, but against old 
age. Till the last year of his life he never gave in, 
but always did everything for himself and even rode 
on horseback. 

It is absurd therefore to suppose that he had no 
fear of death. It was instinctive with him and 
highly developed; but he always fought it down. 

363 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Did he succeed*? I can answer definitely, yes. 

During his illness he talked a great deal of death 
and prepared himself for it firmly and deliberately. 
When he felt that he was getting weaker he wished 
to say good-by to everybody, and called us all sep- 
arately to his bedside, one after the other, and gave 
his last words of advice to each. He was so weak 
that he spoke in a half whisper and when he had said 
good-by to one he had to rest a while and collect his 
strength for the next. 

When my turn came he said as nearly as I can 
remember: "You are still young and strong and 
tossed by storms of passion. You have not yet had 
time to think over the chief questions of life. But 
this stage will pass. I am sure of it. When the time 
comes, believe me, you will find the truth in the teach- 
ings of the Gospel. I am dying peacefully now, 
because I have come to know that teaching and 
believe in it. May God grant you this knowledge 
soon. Good-by." 

I kissed his hand and left the room quietly. 
When I got to the front door I rushed to a lonely 
stone tower and there sobbed my heart out in the 
darkness like a child. . . . Looking round at last 
I saw that some one else was sitting on the staircase 
near me also crying. So I said farewell to my father 
years before his death and the memory of it is dear 
to me, for I know that if I had seen him when he 

364 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

lay dying at Astapovo he would have said just the 
same to me. 

To return to the question of death, I will say that 
so far from being afraid of death, in his last days he 
often desired it; he was more interested in it than 
afraid of it. This "greatest of mysteries" fascinated 
him to such a degree, that his interest came near to 
love. How eagerly he listened to accounts of the 
death of his friends, Turgenyef, Gay, Leskof,^ 
Zhemtchuzhnikof,^ and others! He inquired after 
the smallest minutiae; no detail, however trifling in 
appearance, was without its interest and importance 
for him. In his "Circle of Reading," November 7th, 
the day he died on, is devoted entirely to thoughts on 
death. "Life is a dream, death is an awakening," 
he wrote, while in expectation of that awakening. 

Apropos of the "Circle of Reading" I cannot re- 
frain from relating a characteristic incident which I 
was told by one of my sisters. 

When my father made up his mind to compile the 
collection of the sayings of the wise, to which he gave 
the name "Circle of Reading," he told one of his 
friends about it. A few days afterwards this 
"friend" came to see him again and at once said that 
he and his wife had been thinking over my father's 
scheme for the new book and had come to the con- 

lA novelist, d. 1895. Some of his stories are to be found In 
Beatrix Tollemache's "Russian Sketches," 1913. 

2 One of the authors of the "Junker Schmidt" collectiono 

365 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

elusion that he ought to eall it "For Every Day" 
instead of "Circle of Reading." To this my father 
replied that he preferred the title "Circle of Read- 
ing," because the word "Circle" suggested the idea 
of the continuity of the reading, which was what he 
meant to express by the title. Half an hour later the 
"friend" came across the room to him and repeated 
exactly the same remark again. This time my father 
made no reply. In the evening when the "friend" 
was preparing to go home, as he was saying good-by 
to my father, he held his hand in his and began once 
more: "Still I must tell you, Lyof Nikolayevitch, 
that I and my wife have been thinking it over and 
we have come to the conclusion," and so on, word for 
word as before. 

"No, no, I want to die, to die as soon as possible," 
groaned my father, when he had seen the "friend" 
off. "Is n't it all the same, whether it 's 'Circle of 
Reading' or Tor Every Day' ? No, it 's time for me 
to die; I cannot live like this any longer." 

And in the end, one of the editions of the sayings 
of the wise actually was called "For Every Day" in- 
stead of "Circle of Reading." 

"Ah, my dear, ever since this Mr. turned up, 

I really don't know which of Lyof Nikolayevitch' s 
writings are by Lyof Nikolayevitch, and which are 
by Mr. !" murmured our honest-hearted old 

366 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

friend, Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt,^ whom cer- 
tainly no one who knew her will suspect of malice. 

This sort of intrusion into my father's work as an 
author bore, in the "friend's" language, the modest 
title of "corrections beforehand" and there is no 
doubt that Marya Alexandrovna was right, for no 
one will ever know where what my father wrote ends 

and where his concessions to Mr. 's persistent 

"corrections beforehand" begin, all the more as this 
careful adviser had the forethought to arrange that 
when my father answered his letters he was always 
to return him the letters they were answers to.^ 

Besides the desire for death which my father dis- 
played, in the last years of his life he cherished an- 
other dream which he made no secret of his hope of 
realizing, and that was the desire to suffer for his con- 
victions. The first impulse in this direction was 
given him by the persecution to which, during his life- 
time, so many of his friends and fellow-thinkers 
were subjected at the hands of the authorities. 
When he heard of any one being put in jail or de- 

3 A schoolmistress from St. Petersburg who became a fast friend 
of the Tolstoys, adopted the peasant life, and settled near Yasnaya. 
(Maude's "Life.") 

*The curious may be disposed to trace to some such "corrections 
beforehand," the remarkable discrepancy of style and matter which 
distinguishes some of Tolstoy's later works, published after his 
death by Mr. Tchertkof and his literary executors, from his earlier 
works. 

367 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

ported for disseminating his writings, one felt sorry 
for him, he was so distressed about it. 

I remember my arrival at Yasnaya some days after 
Gusef's arrest.^ I stayed two days with my father 
and heard of nothing but Gusef. As if there were 
nobody in the world but Gusef! I must confess 
that, sorry as I was for Gusef, who was shut up at 
the time in the local prison at Krapivna, I harbored 
a most wicked feeling of resentment against my 
father for paying so little attention to me and the 
rest of those about him and being so absorbed in the 
thought of Gusef. I willingly acknowledge that I 
was wrong in entertaining this selfish feeling. If I 
had entered fully into my father's sentiments, I 
should have seen this at the time. 

As far back as 1896, in consequence of the arrest 

of a lady-doctor, Miss N in Tula, my father 

wrote a long letter to Muravyof , the Minister of Jus- 
tice, in which he spoke of the "unreasonableness, use- 
lessness, and cruelty of the measures taken by the 
Government against those who disseminate these for- 
bidden writings" and begged him to "direct the meas- 
ures taken to punish or intimidate the perpetrators of 
the evil, or to put an end to it, against the man whom 
you regard as the real instigator of it . . . all the 
more as I assure you beforehand that I shall continue 

5 Tolstoy's private secretary, arrested and banished in 1908. 
(Maude's "Life.") 

368 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

without ceasing, till my death, to do what the Gov- 
ernment considers evil and what I consider my sacred 
duty before God." 

As every one knows, neither this challenge nor the 
others that followed it led to any result, and the 
arrests and deportations of those associated with him 
still went on. My father felt himself morally re- 
sponsible towards all those who suffered on his ac- 
count, and every year new burdens were laid on his 
conscience. 

In 1908, just before his Jubilee,^ my father wrote 
to A. M. Bodyanski : 

To tell you the truth, nothing would satisfy me so much, 
nothing could give me so much pleasure, as actually to be 
put into prison, into a real good prison — stinking, cold, and 
"hungry." ... It would cause me real joy and satisfaction, 
in my old age, so soon before my death; and at the same 
time it would save me from all the horrors of the intended 
Jubilee that I foresee. 

And this was written by that same man who had 
been so enraged at the search instituted at Yasnaya 
Polyana by the police in 1862,"^ and at being bound 
over by the visiting magistrate to remain on his estate 
when our herdsman was gored to death by a bull in 

6 The public celebration of his eightieth birthday. 

7^ The search was made in 1862 in consequence of suspicions 
aroused in the minds of the Police by the establishment of the School. 
They apparently thought that Tolstoy was engaged in some politi- 
cal conspiracy with the village children. 

369 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

1872, that both times he wanted to leave Russia, and 
settle abroad.^ 

• ••••••• 

My father endured moments of terrible agony dur- 
ing my mother's dangerous illness in the autumn of 
1906. When we heard she was ill, all of us, sons 
and daughters, assembled at Yasnaya Polyana. My 
mother had taken to her bed some days before and 
was suffering from excruciating abdominal pains. 
Professor V. F. Snegiryof came at our request and he 
diagnosed a broken-down internal tumor. In order to 
verify his diagnosis he proposed that we should sum- 
mon Professor N. N. Phenomenof from St. Peters- 
burg, for a consultation, but my mother's illness ad- 
vanced with such rapid strides that early in the morn- 
ing on the third day after his arrival, Snegiryof woke 
us all up and said that he had decided not to wait 
for Phenomenof because my mother would die unless 
he operated at once. He went and told my father. 
My father did not believe that an operation would 
do any good ; he thought that my mother was dying, 
and he was praying and preparing for her death. He 
believed that "the great and solemn moment of death 
had approached ; that it was our duty to submit to the 

8 Tolstoy was confined to his estate for two months. The charge 
preferred against him was of manslaughter by keeping a dangerous 
bull; but the indictment was withdrawn at the sessions. Tolstoy 
said he would go to England, which was the only place where a 
man could be free. (Maude's "Life.") 

370 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

will of God, and that any interference on the part of 
doctors would only impair the grandeur and solem- 
nity of the great act of death." When the doctor 
asked him in so many words whether he consented to 
an operation or not, he answered that my mother and 
her children must decide for themselves, and that he 
washed his hands of it and wQuld not declare himself 
either for or against it. 

During the operation he retired into the "Thicket," 
and walked alone in prayer. "If the operation is 
successful, ring twice on the big bell ; and if not . . . 
No, do not ring at all; I will come myself," he said, 
changing his mind, and walked slowly away to the 
wood. 

Half an hour later, when the operation was over, 
I and my sister Masha ran out to look for him. He 
came towards us, pale with fear. 

"Successful! Successful!" we shouted from afar, 
catching sight of him on the edge of the wood. 

"Good, go back, I will come in a minute," he said, 
in a voice full of suppressed emotion and turned back 
into the wood again. 

A little later, when my mother had recovered from 
the anaesthetic, he went up to her room, and came out 
again choking with indignation. 

"Great Heavens, what a horrible thing! A 
huijian being cannot even be left to die in peace!" 

It was not till a few days later, when my mother 

373 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

was completely restored to health, that he calmed 
down again and ceased from abusing the doctors for 
their interference. 



374 



CHAPTER XXIV 

MY father's diary. FAINTING 
FITS. WEAKNESS. 

AS I reach the description of the last days of 
my father's life I must once more make it 
clear that what I write is based only on 
the unrecorded memory of the impressions I received 
in my periodical visits to Yasnaya Polyana. Un- 
fortunately I have no rich shorthand material to rely 
on such as Gusef and Bulgakof had for their Mem- 
oirs, and more especially Dushan Petrovitch Mako- 
vicky/ who is preparing, I am told, a big and con- 
scientious work, full of truth and interest. 

In November 1906, my sister Masha died of in- 
flammation of the lungs. It is a curious thing, that 
she vanished out of life with just as little commotion 
as she had passed through it. Evidently this is the 
lot of all the pure in heart. No one was particu- 
larly astonished by her death. I remember that 
when I received the telegram, I felt no surprise. It 
seemed perfectly natural to me. Masha had mar- 
ried a kinsman of ours, Prince Obolenski; she lived 

"^ Makovickf was the doctor who lived at Yasnaya Polyana, and 
accompanied Tolstoy in his final flight. 

375 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

on her own estate at Pirogovo,^ 21 miles from us, 
and spent half the year with her husband at Yasnaya. 
She was very delicate and had constant illnesses. 

When I arrived at Yasnaya the day after her death 
I was aware of an atmosphere of exaltation and 
prayerful emotion about the whole family, and it 
was then I think for the first time that I realized the 
full grandeur and beauty of death. 

I distinctly felt that, by her death, Masha, so far 
from having gone away from us, had come nearer to 
us and been, as it were, welded to us forever, in a 
way that she never could have been during her life- 
time. I observed the same frame of mind in my 
father. He went about, silent and woe-begone, 
summoning all his strength to battle with his own 
sorrow; but I never heard him utter a murmur or a 
complaint, nothing but words of tender emotion. 

When the coffin was carried to the church he 
changed his clothes and went with the cortege. 
When he reached the stone pillars he stopped us, said 
farewell to the departed and walked home along the 
avenue. I looked after him and watched him walk 
away across the wet thawing snow with his short 
quick old-man's steps, turning his toes out at a sharp 
angle as he always did, and never once looking round. 

My sister Masha had held a position of enormous 

2 After her Uncle Sergei's death, "Masha" purchased part of 
the Pirogovo estate from his widow. 

376 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

importance in my father's life and in the life of the 
whole family. 

Many a time, in the last few years, have we had 
occasion to think of her and to murmur sadly : "If 
only Masha had been with us. . . . If only Masha 
had not died." 

In order to explain the relations between Masha 
and my father I must turn back a considerable way. 
There was one distinguishing and at first sight pe- 
culiar trait in my father's character — due perhaps to 
the fact that he grew up without a mother, or perhaps 
implanted in him by Nature — and that was that all 
exhibitions of tenderness were entirely foreign to him. 
I say "tenderness" in contradistinction to "feeling." 
Feeling he had, and in a very high degree. 

His description of the death of my Uncle Nikolai 
is characteristic in this connection. In a letter to an- 
other brother Sergei Nikolayevitch, in which he de- 
scribes the last day of Nikolai's life, my father tells 
him how he helped him to undress.^ 

"He submitted and became a different man. . . . 
He had a word of praise for everybody and said to 
me, Thanks, my friend.' You understand the sig- 
nificance of the words as between us two." 

It is evident that in the language of the brothers 
Tolstoy, the words "my friend" were an expression 

3 Nikolai Tolstoy died of consumption while abroad with Lyof 
Nikolayevitch. 

377 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of tenderness beyond which imagination could not go. 
The words astonished my father even on the lips of 
his dying brother. 

During all his lifetime I never received any mark 
of tenderness from him whatever. He was not fond 
of kissing children and when he did so in saying good- 
morning or good-night he did it merely as a duty. 

It is easy therefore to understand that he did not 
provoke any display of tenderness towards himself 
and that nearness and dearness with him was never 
accompanied by any outward manifestations. It 
would never have come into my head, for instance, 
to walk up to my father and kiss him or to stroke his 
hand. I was partly prevented also by the fact that 
I always looked up to him with such awe, and his 
spiritual power, his greatness, prevented me from see- 
ing in him the mere man, the man who was so pitiable 
and weary at times, the feeble old man who so much 
needed warmth and rest. 

The only person who could give him that warmth 
was Masha. 

She would go up to him, stroke his hand, caress 
him, and say something affectionate, and you could 
see that he liked it and was happy and even returned 
her caress. It was as if he became a different man 
with her. 

Why was it that Masha was able to do this, while 
no one else even dared to try"? If any other of us 

378 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

had done it it would have seemed unnatural, but 
Masha could do it with perfect simplicity and sin- 
cerity. I do not mean to say that others about my 
father loved him less than Masha; not at all; but the 
display of love for him was never so warm and at the 
same time so natural with any one else as with her. 
So that with Masha's death my father was deprived 
of this natural source of warmth which, with ad- 
vancing years, had become more and more of a neces- 
sity to him. 

Another and still greater power that she possessed 
was her remarkably delicate and sensitive conscience. 
This trait in her was still dearer to my father than 
her caresses. How good she was at smoothing away 
all misunderstandings! How she always stood up 
for those who were found any fault with — justly or 
unjustly, it was all the same to her. Masha could 
reconcile everybody and everything. 

When I heard that my father had left his home on 
the 28th October the first thing that occurred to me 
was: "If only Masha had been there!" 



During the last years of his life my father's health 
perceptibly grew worse. Several times he had the 
most sudden and inexplicable fainting fits, from 
which he used to recover the next day, but he always 
lost his memory for the time. 

379 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Seeing my brother Andrei's children, who were 
staying at Yasnaya, in the zala one day, he asked 
with some surprise, "Whose children are these *?" 
Meeting my wife he said: "Don't be offended, my 
dear, I know that I am very fond of you ; but I have 
quite forgotten who you are" ; and when he went up 
to the zala after one of these fainting fits, he looked 
round with an astonished air and said: "Where's 
my brother Mitenka?" ^ a brother who had died fifty 
years before. The following day all traces of the 
attack would have disappeared. 

During one of these fainting fits my brother Sergei, 
in undressing my father, found a little note-book on 
him. He put it in his own pocket and next day, 
when he came to see my father, he handed it back 
to him, telling him that he had not read it. 

"There would have been no harm in your seeing 
it," said my father, as he took it. 

This little diary, in which he wrote down his most 
secret thoughts and prayers, was kept "for himself 
alone" and he never showed it to any one. I saw 
this book after my father's death. It was impossible 
to read it without tears. 

In spite of the very great interest of these notes 
written so shortly before his death I will not recite 
their substance here. I should be sorry to publish 
what my father wrote "for himself alone." The fact 

* Dimitri Nikolayevitch. 

380 




PRINCESS OBOLENSKY AND AUNT MASHA 




ON THE ESTATE " MESHTCHERSKOE " IN JUNE, 1910 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

that such a diary was ever kept at all speaks abun- 
dantly for itself. 

"The real diary" . . . "real" because the rest 
of the diaries in which he wrote down his abstract 
impersonal thoughts and spiritual experiences were 
never put away but lay openly on the table. Every 
one could read them who wanted to ; and people not 
only read them but some of his "friends" carried 
them away home with them and copied them out. 
This was the cause of the silent and stubborn strug- 
gle which arose between my mother and the 
"friends," and which ended in my father's instituting 
this new diary "of his own." He needed his own 
Holy of Holies where nobody could intrude ; and this 
diary "of his own" he kept hidden in the leg of his 
boot. 

• • • • • • • •. 

The last time I was at Yasnaya Polyana was at 
the beginning of the autumn. My father welcomed 
me cordially and affectionately as he always did. 
Whenever one of his sons arrived he was always 
delighted and always met us with some cheerful 
greeting. He would tell me that he had lately 
dreamt about me, or that I was the very person he 
was looking out for, because the others had just been 
there; in fact it always appeared that one's arrival 
had been timed exactly for the right moment. 

Although I was already pretty well accustomed to 

383 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

my father's indispositions, I was particularly struck 
by his feebleness this time. And not so much by 
his physical feebleness as by a certain air of self- 
concentration and abstraction from the outer 
world. 

I retain a very sad remembrance of this interview. 
It seemed as if my father were trying to avoid all 
conversation with me, as if I had offended him in 
some way. Besides that, I was very much struck 
by the decay of his memory. Although I had been 
working already for five years in the Peasants' Bank 
and he knew that perfectly well — so much so that he 
had availed himself of an incident I had told him 
that I had come across at the office for the article 
that he was writing at the time — he completely forgot 
all about it on this visit and asked me where I was 
working and what I was doing. He was very absent- 
minded in every respect and, as it were, cut off from 
the rest of the world. 

It is curious that the sudden decay of my father's 
memory displayed itself only in the matter of real 
facts and people. He was entirely unaffected in his 
literary work, and everything that he wrote, down to 
the last days of his life, is marked by his characteristic 
logicalness and force. It may be that the reason he 
forgot the details of real life was that he was too 
deeply absorbed in his abstract work. 



384 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

My wife was at Yasnaya Polyana in October and 
when she got home told me that there was something 
wrong there: "Your mother is nervous and hyster- 
ical; your father is in a silent and gloomy frame of 
mind." I was very busy with my office-work but 
made up my mind to devote my first free day to going 
and seeing my parents. When I got to Yasnaya my 
father had already left it. 



385 



CHAPTER XXV 

MY AUNT MASHA TOLSTOY 

MY father's only sister, Maria Nikolayevna, 
was a year and a half younger than he was. 
She had been married to her namesake 
and distant kinsman Valerian Petrovitch Tolstoy, 
but that was before my time, and I only remember 
her as a widow with three children, a son Nikolenka 
(who died in the seventies), and two daughters, 
Varya and Lizanka. She owned part of Pirogovo, 
where she had her house and farm two miles from her 
brother Sergei Nikolayevitch's demesne. Ever since 
I can remember, Aunt Masha always came and stayed 
every year at Yasnaya Polyana, with her children 
as long as her daughters remained unmarried, and 
later alone. The last twenty odd years of her life 
she was a nun in the Shamardino Convent, where she 
died in the spring of 1912, at the age of eighty- two, 
a year and a half after my father's death. 

In the essential features of her character my Aunt 
Masha resembled my father in many ways. She had 
the same brilliant and original intelligence, the same 
sensitiveness to impressions, the same wonderful 

386 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

memory, and above all, the same austerity towards 
herself, admitting of no compromises or half-meas- 
ures in her perpetual striving after truth. Strange 
as it may seem, he with his complete disavowal of all 
rites and ceremonies and she the strictly orthodox 
nun were united by the same passionate and contin- 
ual search after God, whom they both loved equally, 
but whom each worshiped in a different way, accord- 
ing to the measure of their strength and understand- 
ing. 

My father was always very fond of Aunt Masha 
and had a subtle understanding of her heart. As he 
approached extreme old age his sentiment of friend- 
ship turned into a profound tenderness, which exhales 
from all his last letters to her. 

"Your brother Lyof, who loves you the more the 
older he grows," he signs himself in one of his last 
letters to her, in 1909. 

"Your letter touched me almost to the point of 
tears, both by the love in it and by the real religious 
feeling which inspires it," he writes in another place, 
referring to a letter of hers to Dr. Makovicky. 

It is easy to understand that when my father re- 
solved to forsake Yasnaya Polyana forever, to leave 
"the life of the world, in order to live out in solitude 
and peace the last days of my life" he was almost 
sure to go and see my Aunt Masha, who was the only 
person capable of understanding the crisis he was 

387 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

passing through and who could weep with him and 
give him some peace of mind. 

This is my Aunt Masha's own description of her 
last interview with her brother, given in a letter to 
my mother dated April 22d, 1911. 

Christ is risen ! ^ 

Dearest Sonya, I was very glad to get your letter; I 
thought that after such sorrow and despair you would not 
care to be troubled with me, and I was greatly grieved at 
the thought. I think that, apart from the calamity of los- 
ing such a beloved man, you have other reasons for being 
greatly distressed. You ask me, what inference I have 
drawn from all that has occurred. How can I tell, out of 
all the conflicting accounts that I have heard from people 
about your house, what is true and what is false? Still, 
I think, as the saying is, that there is no smoke without fire, 
and there was probably something wrong. 

When Lyovotchka arrived here he was terribly down- 
cast at first, and when he told me that you had thrown 
yourself into the pond he wept outright, and I could not 
look at him without tears in my eyes. But he told me 
nothing about you; all he said was that he had come for 
a long time, and meant to take a peasant's cottage and live 
here. It seems to me that what he wanted was solitude; 
he could no longer endure the life of Yasnaya Polyana — 
he told me so the last time I stayed with you — where all 
the surroundings were so much at variance with his own 
convictions; he merely wished to settle down in accordance 
with his own tastes and to live in solitude, where nobody 
would interfere with him ; that is what I gathered from his 

^An Easter greeting. 

388 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

words. Until Sasha's ^ arrival he had no intention of going 
away, but was preparing to visit the Opta Hermitage and 
wished without fail to talk with the old Confessor. But 
Sasha turned everything upside down by her arrival the 
next day. When he went off that evening to sleep at the 
hotel he had not the slightest intention of going away, but 
said to me: "Au revoir, I shall see you to-morrow." Im- 
agine my astonishment and despair when I was awakened 
at five o'clock the next morning — it was still dark — and 
told that he was leaving. I got up at once, ordered the 
carriage and drove to the hotel; but he had gone already, 
and I saw no more of him. 

I do not know what had been passing between you. 
. . .^ was certainly much to blame for it, but there must 
have been some special reason, otherwise Lyof, at his age, 
could never have brought himself to leave Yasnaya Polyana 
at night, with such hurried preparations, in weather like 
that. 

I can well believe that it is all very bitter for you, dearest 
Sonya; but do not reproach yourself; all this has undoubt- 
edly come about by the will of God. His days were num- 
bered and it pleased God to send him this last trial by one 
of those nearest and dearest to him. 

That, dearest Sonya, is all that I have been able to infer 
from the whole of this astonishing and terrible series of 
events. He was an extraordinary man, and his end has 
been extraordinary too. I hope that in return for his love 
of Christ and his labor with himself to live according to 

2 Sasha, i. e., Alexandra Lvovna, Tolstoy's daughter. She 
succeeded her sister "Masha" as her father's secretary, and repre- 
sents the sterner, more dogmatic, side of Tolstoy's doctrines, as 
maintained by Tchertkof. 

3 The gender shows that the name omitted is that of a man. 

389 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

the Gospel, He, the All-merciful, will not turn him away 
from Himself. 

Dearest Sonya, do not be angry with me; I have written 
openly all that I thought and felt ; I cannot beat about the 
bush with you; you are too near and dear to me; and I 
shall always love you, whatever may have happened. He, 
my beloved Lyovotchka, loved you so too. 

I do not Laow if I shall be in a condition to visit 
Lyovotchka's grave in the summer; I have grown very 
feeble since his death. I do not walk at all now; I only 
drive to the church, my one comfort. Come into retreat at 
the Convent; open your heart to the old Confessor; he will 
understand everything and restore your peace of mind. God 
will forgive all and cover all with His love. Throw your- 
self at His feet with tears and you will see how peace will 
establish itself in your heart. Rest assured ... all this 
has been the work of the Enemy. Good-by, be well and at 
peace. 

Your loving sister, 

M ASHEN KA. 

p. S. I live with another nun, but I hardly ever see her ; 
she is always occupied with household duties about the con- 
vent. 

Where are you staying, Sonya, and what are your plans 
for the future? Where do you mean to live, and what 
address am I to send letters to? Three of your sons, all 
except Lyova and Misha, have been to visit me, one after 
the other; I was very glad to see them indeed; I am very 
sorry that I do not see more of them. Ilyusha's wife 
Sonya came ; she was very sweet. 

This letter is so full of goodness and really sincere 
religious feeling that I should have been glad to close 

390 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

my Reminiscences with it. It is the best view that 
any one could take of the last events of my father's 
life. 

I paid Aunt Masha a visit some little time after 
my father's funeral. We sat together in her com- 
fortable little cell, and she repeated to me once more 
in detail the oft-repeated story of my father's last 
visit to her. 

"He sat in that very arm-chair where you are sit- 
ting now: and how he cried!" she said. "When 
Sasha arrived with her girl-friend, they set to work 
studying the map of Russia and planning out a route 
to the Caucasus. Lyovotchka sat there thoughtful 
and melancholy. 

" 'Never mind, papa; it will be all right,' said 
Sasha, trying to encourage him. 

" 'Ah, you women, you women.!' answered her 
father bitterly : 'how can it ever be all right?' 

"I so much hoped that he would settle down here; 
it would just have suited him. And it was his own 
idea too; he had even taken a cottage in the village," 
Aunt Masha sadly recalled. "When he left me to go 
back to the hotel where he was stopping, it seemed 
to me that he was rather calmer. When he said 
good-by he even made some joke about his having 
come to the wrong door. I certainly never could 
have imagined that he would go away again that 
same night." 

393 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

It was a grievous trial for Aunt Masha when the 
old Confessor losif, who was her spiritual director, 
forbad-e her to pray for her dead brother, because he 
had been excommunicated. She was too independ- 
ent-minded to be able to reconcile herself to the 
harsh intolerance of the Church and for a time she 
was honestly indignant. Another priest to whom she 
applied also refused. Marya Nikolayevna could not 
bring herself to disobey her spiritual fathers, but at 
the same time she felt that she was not really obeying 
their injunction, for she prayed for him all the same, 
in thought if not in words. There is no knowing how 
her internal discord would have ended if her Father 
Confessor, evidently understanding the moral tor- 
ment she was suffering, had not given her permission 
to pray for her brother, but only in her cell and in soli- 
tude, so as not to lead others astray. 



394 



CHAPTER XXVI 

MY father's will. CONCLUSION. 

ALTHOUGH my father had long since re- 
nounced the copyright in all his works 
written after 1883, and although, after 
having made all his real estate over to his children, 
he had as a matter of fact no property left, still he 
could not but be aware that his life was far from cor- 
responding with his principles, and this consciousness 
perpetually preyed upon his mind. One has but to 
read some of his posthumous works attentively to see 
that the idea of leaving home and radically altering 
his whole way of life had presented itself to him long 
since and was a continual temptation to him. 

This was the cherished dream which always allured 
him but which he did not think himself justified in 
putting into practice. The life of the Christian must 
be a "reasonable and happy life in all "possible cir- 
cumstances'' he used to say as he struggled with the 
temptation to go away, and gave up his own soul for 
others. 

I remxcmber reading in Gusef s Memoirs how my 
father once in conversation with Gusaryof the peas- 
ant, who had made up his mind to leave his home for 

395 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

religious reasons, said: "My life is a hundred thou- 
sand times more loathsome than yours, but yet I can- 
not leave it." 

I will not enumerate all the letters of abuse and 
bewilderment which my father received from every 
side, upbraiding him with luxury, with inconsistency, 
and even with torturing his peasants.^ It is easy to 
imagine what an impression they made on him. He 
said Yes, there was good reason to revile him; he 
called their abuse ''a bath for the soul," but internally 
he suffered from the "bath" and saw no way out of his 
difficulties. He bore his cross, and it was in this self- 
renunciation that his power consisted, though many 
either could not or would not acknowledge it. He 
alone, in spite of all those about him, knew that this 
cross was laid on him not of man but of God; and 
while he was strong he loved his burden and shared 
it with none. 

Just as thirty years before my father had been 
haunted by the temptation to suicide, so now he strug- 
gled with a new and more powerful temptation, that 
of flight. A few days before he left Yasnaya he 
called on Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt at Ovsyan- 
niki and confessed to her that he wanted to go away. 

The old lady threw up her hands in horror and 
said: "Gracious Heavens, Lyof Nikolayevitch, 
have you fallen a victim to that weakness'?" 

iThat is, in his young days, before the Emancipation of 1861. 

396 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

When I learnt, on the 28th October, 1910, that my 
father had left Yasnaya, the same idea occurred to 
me, and I even put it into words in a letter I sent to 
him at Shamardino by my sister Sasha. I did not 
know at the time about certain circumstances which 
have since made a great deal clear to me that was ob- 
scure before. 

From the moment of my father's death till now, 
I have been racking my brains to discover what could 
have given him the impulse to take that last step. 
What power could compel him to yield in the strug- 
gle in which he had held on so firmly and tenaciously 
for so many years? What was the last drop, the 
last grain of sand that turned the scales and sent him 
forth to search for a new life on the very edge of the 
grave*? 

Could my father really have fled from home be- 
cause the wife with whom he had lived for forty- 
eight years had developed neurasthenia and at one 
time showed certain abnormalities characteristic of 
that malady? Was that like the man who loved 
his fellows and knew the human heart so well ? Or 
did he suddenly desire, when he was eighty-three, and 
weak and helpless, to realize the ideal of a pilgrim's 
life? If so, why did he take my sister Sasha and 
Dr. Makovicky with him? He could not but know 
that in their company he would be just as well pro- 
vided with all the necessaries of life as he would 

397 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

have been at Yasnaya Polyana. It would have been 
the most palpable self-deception. 

Knowing my father as I did, I felt that the ques- 
tion of his flight was not so simple as it seemed to 
others, and the problem lay long unsolved before 
me, until it was suddenly made clear by the Will that 
he left behind him. I remember how, after N. S. 
Leskof s death, my father read me out his posthu- 
mous instructions with regard to a pauper funeral, 
no speeches at the grave and so on, and how the idea 
of writing his own Will then came into his head for 
the first time. 

His first Will was written in his diary, on March 
27th, 1895.^ It is printed in full in the Tolstoy An- 
nual for 1912, and I will therefore give only some 
extracts here. The first two paragraphs refer to his 
funeral and the announcement of his death. The 
third paragraph deals with the sorting out and print- 
ing of his posthumous papers, and the fourth, to 
which I wish to call particular attention, contains a 
request to his next of kin to transfer the right of pub- 
lishing his writings to society at large or, in other 
words, to renounce the copyright of them. "But I 
only request it," the italics are mine, "and do not 
direct it. It is a good thing to do. And it will be 
good for you to do it; but if you do not do it, that 
is your affair. It means that you are not yet ready to 

2 Five weeks after Leskof 's death. 

398 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

do it. The fact that my writings have been bought 
and sold during these last ten years has been the most 
painful thing in my whole life to me." 

Three copies were made of this Will and they were 
kept by my sister Masha, since deceased, by my 
brother Sergei, and by Tchertkof. I knew of its 
existence, but I never saw it till after my father's 
death, and I never inquired of anybody about the 
details of it. 

I knew my father's views about authors' copyright 
and no Will of his could have added anything to 
what I knew. I knew moreover that this Will was 
not properly executed according to the forms of law 
and, personally, I was glad of that, for I saw in it an- 
other proof of my father's confidence in his family. 
I need hardly add that I never doubted that my 
father's wishes would be carried out. My sister 
Masha, with whom I once had a conversation on the 
subject, was of the same opinion. 

In 1909 my father stayed with Mr. Tchertkof at 
Krekshino, and there for the first time he wrote a 
formal Will, attested by the signature of witnesses. 
How this Will was written I do not know, and I do 
not intend to discuss the point. It afterwards ap- 
peared that it was also imperfect from a legal point 
of view, and in October, 1909, it all had to be done 
over again. 

As to the writing of the third Will we are fully 

399 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

illuminated by Mr. F. Strakhof,^ in an article which 
he published in the St. Petersburg Gazette on the 
6th of November, 1911. 

Mr. Strakhof left Moscow at night. He had cal- 
culated on Sofya Andreyevna/ "whose presence at 
Yasnaya Polyana was highly inexpedient for the 
business on which I was bound," being still in Mos- 
cow. The business in question, as was made clear in 
the preliminary consultation which V. G. Tchertkof 
held with N. K. Muravyof the solicitor, consisted in 
getting fresh signatures from Lyof Nikolayevitch, 
whose great age made it desirable to make sure with- 
out delay of his wishes being carried out by means of 
a more unassailable legal document. Strakhof 
brought the draft of the Will with him and laid it 
before Lyof Nikolayevitch. 

"After reading the paper through, he at once wrote 
under it that he agreed with its purport, and then 
added, after a pause : 'All this business is very dis- 
agreeable to me; and it is quite unnecessary to 
ensure the propagation of my ideas by taking all 
sorts of measures. . . . Why, no word can perish 
without leaving its trace, if it expresses a truth and if 
the man who utters it believes profoundly in its truth. 
But all these outward means for ensuring it come only 

3 Not to be confused with N. N. Strakhof. — I. T. 
*The Countess Tolstoy. 

400 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of our disbelief in what we utter.' And with these 
words Lyof Nikolayevitch left the study^" 

Thereupon Mr. Strakhof began to consider what 
he must do next, whether he should go back with 
empty hands, or whether he should argue it out. He 
decided to argue it out, and endeavored to explain to 
my father how painful it would be for his friends 
after his death to hear people blaming him for not 
having taken any steps, in spite of his strong opinion 
on the subject, to see that his wishes were carried 
out, and for having thereby helped to transfer his 
copyrights to the members of his family. My father 
promised to think it over and left the room again. 

At dinner Sofya Andreyevna "was evidently far 
from having any suspicions." When my father was 
not by, however, she asked Mr. Strakhof what he had 
come down about. Inasmuch as Mr. Strakhof "had 
other affairs in hand besides the above mentioned 
business," he told her "about one thing and another 
with an easy conscience," saying nothing, of course, 
about the chief object of his visit. 

Mr. Strakhof goes on to describe a second visit to 
Yasnaya when he came to attest the same Will as a 
witness. 

When he arrived "the Countess had not yet come 
down. ... I breathed again." 

When he had finished his business, "as I said good- 
401 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

by to Sofya Andreyevna I examined her countenance 
attentively : such complete tranquillity and cordiality 
towards her departing guests was written on it that 
I had not the smallest doubt of her complete igno- 
rance of what was going on. ... I left the house 
with the pleasing consciousness of a work well done, 
a work that was destined to have considerable historic 
consequences. I felt only some little twinge within, 
certain qualms of conscience about the conspiratorial 
character of the transaction." 

But even this text of the Will did not quite satisfy 
my father's "friends and advisers" ; it was redrafted 
for the fourth and last time in July, 1910. This 
last draft was written by my father himself in the 
Limonovski Forest, two miles from the house, not 
far from Mr. Tchertkof's estate.^ 

Such is the melancholy history of this document, 
which was destined to have "considerable historic 
consequences." 

"All this business is very disagreeable to me, and it 
is quite unnecessary," my father said, when he signed 
the paper that was thrust before him. That was his 
real opinion about his Will, and it never altered to 
the end of his days. Is there any need for proof of 
that^ I think one need know very little of his con- 
victions to have no doubt about it. Was Lyof 

^Tchertkof had bought a property near Yasnaya Polyana. The 
Will was written literally out in the woods, among the trees. 

402 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

Nikolayevitch Tolstoy likely of his own accord to 
have recourse to the protection of the law^ And, if 
he did, was he likely to conceal it from his wife and 
children^ 

If even an outsider like Mr. Strakhof felt some 
"twinges" and "qualms of conscience" about the 
"conspiratorial character of the transaction," what 
must my father himself have felt ? He had been put 
into a position from which there was absolutely no 
issue. To tell his wife was out of the question: it 
would have grievously offended his "friends." To 
have destroyed the Will would have been worse still : 
for his "friends" had suffered for his principles, mor- 
ally, and some of them materially, and had been 
exiled from Russia.^ And he felt himself bound to 
them. And on the top of all this were his fainting 
fits, his increasing loss of memory, the clear conscious- 
ness of the approach of death, and the continually 
growing nervousness of his wife, who felt in her heart 
of hearts the unnatural estrangement of her husband 
and could not understand it. And if she asked him 
what it was that he was concealing from her, he 
would either have to say nothing or to tell her the 
truth. But that was impossible. 

What was he to do? 

And so it came about that the long-cherished dream 

* This applies to Tchertkof who lived for years in England, pub- 
lishing Tolstoy's political and religious articles. 

403 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

of leaving Yasnaya Polyana presented itself as the 
only means of escape. It was certainly not in order 
to enjoy the full realization of his dream that he left 
his home; he went away only as a choice of evils. 
"I am too feeble and too old to begin a new life," he 
had said to my brother Sergei only a few days before 
his departure. Harassed, ill in body and in mind, 
he started forth without any object in view, without 
any thought-out plan, merely in order to hide himself 
somewhere, wherever it might be, and get some rest 
from the moral tortures which had become insupport- 
able to him. 

"To fly, to fly !" he said in his death-bed delirium, 
as he lay at Astapovo. 

"Has papa considered that mama may not survive 
the separation from him*?" I asked my sister Sasha 
on the 29th of October, when she was on the point of 
going to join him at Shamardino. 

"Yes, he has considered all that and still made up 
his mind to go, because he thinks that nothing could 
be worse than the state that things have come to 
here," she answered. 

I confess that my explanation of my father's flight 
by no means exhausts the question. Life is in- 
finitely complex and every explanation of a man's 
conduct is bound to suffer from one-sidedness. Be- 
sides, there are circumstances of which I do not care 
to speak at the present moment, in order not to cause 

404 



REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY 

unnecessary pain to people still living. I should 
like to think that some,' at any rate, of those who 
have been blamed for their part in these transactions 
were innocent. 

If those who were about my father during the last 
years of his life had known what they were doing, 
it may be that things would have turned out differ- 
ently. 

The years will pass. The accumulated incrus- 
tations which hide the truth will pass away. Much 
will be wiped out and forgotten. Among other 
things my father's Will will be forgotten, that Will 
which he himself looked on as an "unnecessary, 
outward means." And men will see more clearly 
that legacy of love and truth in which he believed 
so deeply and which, according to his own words, 
"cannot perish without a trace." 

In concluding this chapter I cannot refrain from 
quoting the opinion of one of my kinsmen, who, after 
my father's death, read the two diaries kept by my 
father and by my mother during the autumn before 
Lyof Nikolayevitch left Yasnaya Polyana. 

"What a terrible misunderstanding!" he said. 
"Each was a martyr to love for the other; each suf- 
fered without ceasing for the other's sake; and then 
— this terrible ending! It was as if Fate itself had 
stepped in with some purpose of its own to fulfil." 

THE END 



rTSVT\2vr7Y7Z 



I 0, ii i^' 



